


stranger in the stars

by unprofessionalbard



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, M/M, Moderate Violence, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, Technically major character death but they come back so, Temporary Character Death, i was wrong about the original minor violence tag its just a regular amount of violence, okay lbr Medium Burn, set during The Stolen Century, sort of a soulmate au? but not in the fandom way, which is like slow burn but for impatient people
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-03-27 02:45:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 45,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13871436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unprofessionalbard/pseuds/unprofessionalbard
Summary: "Do you believe in fate?" asks Kravitz, and damn him for asking Taako not to laugh, because mocking is all Taako has when facing questions like that. Kravitz presses on. "I mean— not that all events are immovable and unchangeable, but that some events... some people, are written into every possible choice?""Very modest, Krav," jokes Taako. Kravitz doesn't laugh."I wasn't talking about myself."***The year resets, and Taako hopes, against his better judgement, that Kravitz is in this world too.





	1. A Familiar Face

Taako likes the inhabited worlds best, but only if he doesn’t think about it too hard. He tries not to say so. Lup hates them, hates meeting people when she knows what will happen to them at the end of the year, so he’s not exactly gonna start parading that those are his favourite worlds. 

Sue him, okay? The IPRE crew are… tolerable (okay, more than tolerable, but you won't catch him saying that out loud), but sometimes it feels like he’s going stir crazy with just them all the time. He likes going out and talking to other people who haven’t already heard all his best jokes, likes telling locals when they’ve fucked up a recipe. Likes the busy marketplaces and quiet libraries, likes haggling with merchants and jokingly flirting with strangers in bars.

So what if it’s hard to meet people’s eyes after a few months? It’s not like what happens is his fault. In fact, they should be thanking him and the rest of the crew for trying to save their asses every year. 

It’s getting late in the cycle. They’ve been at this nearly a decade and Magnus still doesn’t know how to knock so Taako had gone out for a few hours to get some space. There’s only a small amount of spellbooks in the local library and he’s already poured over most of them— most of them aren’t his school of magic and what there is he’s learned or knew already— but studying magic is, at the very least, something to do when he doesn’t have access to the kitchen. 

(And that’s another thing, Barry had said he’d fix the oven but he still hadn’t and if he didn’t get his shit together soon, they had no idea when the next world that had the supplies for it would be, and like hell was Taako suffering through multiple years with no form of stress relief.)

“We’re closing in an hour.”

Taako looks up over the top of his book at the man standing in front of him, and faintly recognizes him as the librarian. He doesn’t check books out, so they’ve never spoken (the more he gives off the air that he’s never studied a day in his life and learned magic by just being incredibly cool and naturally intelligent the better, and he’s not about to take a book back to the ship and shatter that illusion), but Taako would be lying if he said he hadn’t checked _him_ out before. 

He’s tall, maybe a couple inches taller than Taako, and hasn’t seemed to have heard about casual clothes yet. His dreadlocks are pulled back and tied up out of his face. He’s got a killer jawline and _unbelievably_ warm brown eyes. Definitely one of the best looking men Taako has ever seen, which is actually saying something since he’s seen several planer system’s worth of good looking people (yet _another_ benefit of inhabited worlds).

Taako nods, and then, right before the librarian turns away, says, “Is this everything you ha— you’ve got on transmutation?”

The librarian turns back, looking over the books Taako has at his table. “Unfortunately yes. I can request more from other branches, if you like, they’ll only take a few days to get here. Are you looking at anything in particular?”

“Well, not really, I just— I know most of this already.”

The librarian raises his eyebrows. “You’ve been coming here twice a week to read about things you already know about?”

Taako flushes, and tries look irritated but doesn’t quite muster up the intensity he wants to. “Brushing up,” he says, "And besides that's— uh, that one's on you— your library for not having an extensive enough collection." The man laughs, and Taako's irritated look threatens to break into a grin. 

“No wonder you’ve never taken anything home.”

This time, it’s Taako’s turn to laugh. “My man, you do not want me taking these books ho— these books back with me, unless you want them turning back up bur— uh, charred, with pages missing.”

“Fair,” he smiles, “I’m notorious for dog-earing my own books.” He pauses, and then repeats. “Even if you just want to read them here, I can put a request in. But I’d need to do it on your behalf, so I’ll need your name.”

“Taako. T-A-A-K-O. And you don’t need to lie about needing it to request books, I would’ve just told you.” Taako throws in a wink for good measure, expecting it to be laughed off but the librarian looks… almost flustered.

“Uh— I mean I’m not lying I do need— it’s for uhm, the funding— we need to know if—“ He clears his throat, and Taako stifles another laugh. “I’ll uhm. I’ll request those books.”

He turns to leave and Taako jumps in one more time. “Well, you can’t not give me your name _now_.”

Despite still being off his game a bit, he smiles. “Kravitz. I’ll see you in a few days?”

“Yeah, for sure.”

It’s another week before Taako makes it back to the library (Barry is fixing the oven today, and while Taako's grateful that it's finally getting done, seeing anyone except Lup in there makes him stressed). For the first time, he actually approaches the front desk. Kravitz looks up from his notebook just as Taako says, “Get those transmutation books in?”

“A few,” says Kravitz, and then leans over in his chair to the shelf next to him, pulling at least twelve books off of it. The books slam onto the desk with a loud _BANG_ when Kravitz drops them, although the other patrons only look up for a second before going back to their own tasks. Taako grins. “There’s apparently a few more from a town a little further away, but those books won’t be here until next week at least,” says Kravitz. 

Taako grabs the stack of books and opens his mouth to say that in that case, he’ll see Kravitz next week too, but stops before the words get out. 

Next week puts them at just over eleven months since they landed. 

It’s not that Taako has an issue lying. Or that he feels guilty or anything. They’ve found the Light, so that’s everything they can do. But in his mind’s eye, he pictures the town square outside overrun by the Hunger, pictures the ceiling of the library splintering as it’s ripped apart. 

“Awesome,” he says from behind his pile of books, and Kravitz smiles, and Taako curses the moment he started having a conversation with this man before smiling back. 

Taako checks out one of the books so he can show Lup a spell in it. Kravitz makes a crack at how he expects it back in one piece and Taako laughs, and says he makes no such promises. 

He doesn’t get the chance to return it. 

As years go, it’s really not the most awful. They’ve had worse. And given their kind of shitty track record, they’ll probably have even worse years. Taako stops talking to strangers anyway, especially near the end of the year, unless totally necessary. It’s just easier if they’re numbers, not faces. He can only afford to care about the seven of them. 

Four cycles later, he’s standing in a crowded marketplace, squinting at one of the merchants across the road and trying to shake the déjà vu he’s getting from him. Beside him, Magnus chows down on a container of unidentifiable food, which is actually sort of impressive considering Taako prides himself on knowing food. It doesn’t look or smell good, so Taako doesn’t mind. 

“How’s that taste?”

“Awful,” says Magnus, although he doesn’t slow down. Taako snorts, gaze still fixed on that merchant. 

It’s probably nothing. He tries to forget the face of most people he interacts with so it’s probably halfway worked and he’s just mixing up faces in his head. It’s fine. He barely remembers what Kravitz looked like. 

The merchant’s dressed mildly more casual than Kravitz was, but in a way that seems to imply the same sense of style with a different resource. His locs are down now, swept over his right shoulder. Taako tries to convince himself it’s that that’s causing the familiarity, but he knows that’s not it. This other man who is not Kravitz laughs, and the déjà vu gets much much worse. 

“Stupid,” mutters Taako. You talk to a handsome man twice in a week and start seeing him in other universes. 

“What?” says Magnus, sort of affronted. It jarrs Taako out of his thoughts, and he turns to Magnus, annoyance written all over his face. “What?” repeats Magnus. 

“Not yo— you know what? Let’s just g— Let’s uh, let’s just collect Barry and get out of here.” Taako spins on his heels to head towards the town square where they said they’d meet Barry, and casts one last look over at Not-Kravitz. 

He’s staring back. And Taako gets a good look at his face, and it’s very hard to chalk this up to misremembering now. He’s exact, a perfect replica of the librarian from four cycles ago. But his face shows absolutely no recognition of Taako whatsoever. 

Also as far as he knows, there aren’t more ways to travel to different planer systems. And how would he have even found Taako again? And what for? As far as Kravitz knew, he was just some guy who showed up a bunch before his library got fucked up. 

Not-Kravitz breaks the eye contact, and Taako lets out tension in his shoulders he hadn’t realized he was holding. He shakes his head once and starts heading towards the town square. 

He swears he feels a gaze on the back of his head, but doesn’t look back to check. 

“Lup, uh, do you— do you ever think you see som— see people you know?” he asks Lup that night, when no one else is around. She looks up from her book, but Taako keeps his eyes on the dough he’s mixing. 

“Like out on the streets during the cycles?”

“Yeah.”

“All the time,” she says. Taako finally looks up at her, and she gives a soft, tired smile. Taako hums an assent, and keeps to himself that he’s not seeing anyone that he misses from home, because the only person he would miss is here. 

It does, however, put his mind at ease about the merchant. Probably just someone who looked kind of similar. Law of large numbers or whatever. They’re seeing a lot of people. Chance must’ve just worked out so he saw two who looked kind of similar only a few cycles apart. 

Lup helps him finish up with the cookies, and he puts it mostly out of his mind. 

The third time Taako sees him, he knows it can’t be coincidence. This world isn’t even super populated, only small towns separated by miles and miles of desert and there’s just no fucking way the law of large numbers accounts for this. 

He looks exactly the damn same. Sitting at one of the tables at this tavern, plucking a few notes on his lyre before jotting something down on the paper in front of him. He hasn’t even looked up to see Taako glaring at him. 

Lucretia hasn’t looked up from her notebook either, but contrary to this all new Kravitz-But-Not-Kravitz, she does pick up on his mood. “Taako, is something wrong?”

Taako sighs. He’d much rather have this discussion with Lup, but if he’s looking for someone who won’t totally brush it off, Lucretia’s his next best bet. 

“Do you see that guy over there? Lyre guy?”

Lucretia looks up (she doesn’t stop writing though, and Taako spares a split second to be a little envious), and then nods. “I see him. Why?” 

“I’ve see— I swear I’ve seen him in two other cycles.” 

Lucretia stops writing. “What do you mean?”

“I mean he was— I mean he was a fuckin’ librarian in, in— back like, six cycles ago? And I talked to him like, right before we had to leave, and then— and then two years af— years later, he popped up as a merchant, and now, here he is, playin’ a fuckin' lyre in the middle of— in this tavern.” 

Lucretia looks over at him again, and then back to Taako, chewing on her bottom lip. “Are you sure they don’t just look similar?”

“No, I’m just fucking— fucking with you,” Taako snaps, voice dripping with sarcasm, and then glares. “I’m pretty fuckin’ sure.”

Lucretia, to her credit, ignores how annoyed Taako is. “If you think it could be something then we should tell Davenport,” she says, which is true enough. 

“I’m gonna— I’m just gonna go talk to him.” He gets to his feet, and ignores Lucretia brushing her hand against his wrist in an effort to stop him. 

“Taako, do you think that’s a— Taako? Taako!”

The man stops playing his lyre as Taako approaches, eyebrows raised, and it’s only then when Taako realizes he hasn’t come up with a plan of action. Shit. Is it too late to just—

“Can I help you?”

“Uh, yeah—” starts Taako, feigning a confidence he doesn’t have (fake it till you make it, right?), and desperately scrambling for something to say that doesn’t sound 100% batshit as an opener. “Are you, uh, is your name Kravitz?”

This gets him a squint and a slightly more thorough once over. “Yes— Have we met?”

And here’s the thing. The only other… being, if you could call it that, that moves through planer systems, besides the Starblaster, is the Hunger. So it would be reasonable to assume the worst about another person travelling from planer system to planer system. But Taako doesn’t really want cause a scene in this tavern, because then he has to deal with it, and it probably wouldn’t even be the fun kind of scene, it would be the kind of scene where he pisses off the person he’s talking to and the people who own the bar and gets kicked out and doesn’t even get anything cool out of it and probably can’t come back. 

This whole situation is setting off alarm bells in his head. Kravitz tilts his head, brow furrowing some more, and either he really doesn’t know who Taako is or he’s a damn good liar. 

Taako sucks in a breath. “Yeah— well, maybe not. If you aren’t just— like if you’re serious about— about uh, not remembering me, then— then this is a little weird.” He gives a nervous laugh, which Kravitz doesn’t seem to know how to take. “Uh, sorry, weird question, do you know— are you— you know anything about like, travelling to other planer systems or uh, anything like that?”

Kravitz stares at Taako for frankly an uncomfortable amount of time. “Other… planer systems?” he says. “I didn’t know there were more than just the one.” Which, okay, Taako should’ve expected that one. Their homeworld had only just got there, and while some worlds were in the process of figuring their shit out, as far as they know, it’s not the norm. 

He goes to say ‘there isn’t’ but it doesn’t come out. What he says instead is, “Oh yeah for sure, there’s—” before he cuts himself off. “You know what— actually nevermind.” _What the fuck?_

“Sorry, I— Am I supposed to know you? I don’t. Remember you, I mean. Who are you?”

“Name’s Taako,” replies Taako, acting on an impulse that super wasn’t his. _Double what the fuck._ “I’m an al—” He coughs to cut himself off. “Actually doesn’t matter. Sort of uh, a bummer that you don’t remember me, cause that makes my job a whole lot harder—”

“Job?”

“Okay gottagobye,” he blurts out, and then turns around to where Lucretia is sitting still, watching him intently. He jerks his head towards the door and starts walking, ignoring Kravitz’s protests and demands for an explanation behind him. Lucretia meets up with him a little down the road, jogging to catch up before falling into step beside him. 

“Well? What did he say?”

“Says he doesn’t uh— has no idea who I am— could be lying but—”

“No,” interrupts Lucretia, “He couldn’t be. I cast Zone of Truth once I realized I wasn’t going to stop you from heading over there.” 

Taako stumbles over his step for a second, torn between complaining about all the dumb shit he said and praising her for fast thinking. The former doesn’t require him being vulnerable, so door number one it is. 

“Oh cool, I was wondering— wondering why I almost told him, uh, told him I was a fuckin’ alien.”

“Sorry,” says Lucretia, doing a very bad job of hiding her smile. 

“Okay. So he’s not— he isn’t lying. But he’s got the same name and the same fuckin’ face—”

“The same name?” Lucretia cuts him off again, and he opens his mouth to complain about that before realizing that she’s on his side with this one. And he’ll sound way more credible with a second opinion backing him up if he decides to talk about this. 

“Yeah.”

Lucretia chews her bottom lip again. “It could be nothing,” she starts, “But I’d bring it up to Davenport and the rest of the crew anyway.”

They don’t get a chance to until the next morning, when everyone’s together for breakfast. And it’s Lucretia who brings it up first, which is great for Taako, because he had definitely not spent the night preparing a good opener for this can of worms. Taako gives them the rundown. 

“It could just be a coincidence,” says Merle through a mouthful of pancakes. Magnus nods, and Taako starts to say something rude when Davenport speaks up. 

“It could be, but if it’s not, I don’t think we should just leave it. Any new information is good, even if it raises more questions than it answers.” He clears his throat. “Any chance you could talk to him again?”

“And say what? He doesn’t remember anything.”

“Well,” starts Barry, pausing when everyone looks at him before pressing on. “If you could get him to come back we might be able to figure out if he’s uh, from this world or if he's even hu— is he human?”

Taako ignores the question to squint at Barry. “You think— let me just. Like recap here. Your plan, for like, talking to a man I already— who already doesn’t know me, that I’ve definitely now, uh, definitely said dumb shit too, is to bring him back here, so you can run a weird experiment.” 

“Okay, well when you put it like that—”

“We can’t run an experiment on some random person,” interjects Lup, and not for the first time, Taako is grateful for her compassionate streak.

“He could be part of the hunger—” says Davenport, and Barry cuts him off to say, “You guys know I don’t mean like, mad scientist type experiment, I mean like a modified version of like, Detect Magic or something—”

“Okay!” Taako slams a hand down on the table. “Okay. Why don’t we— I’ll just go try to find him again, uh, and then we’ll work from, uhm, from there, yeah?” He stabs his fork into his pancake and then adds, “And I’m taking Lup. The rest of you said too much— too much dumb shit this morning.” Lucretia clears her throat, and Taako amends his statement. “Except Lucretia. I’m still, uh, I’m still only gonna take Lup though. No offense.”

“None taken.” Lucretia smiles, and Magnus whines about how he didn’t even say anything until Taako launches a tater tot at him with his fork. 

They don’t get out for another day. Taako’s not too stressed, since it’s a pretty small town with very few public places, so if they loiter enough they should be able to track Kravitz down. Besides, Lup’s busy triangulating the Light, which is still priority number one. 

“What are you gonna do when we find him?” she asks, briefly glancing up from her task. Taako sighs, looking up from the now six year old library book that he got from the first Kravitz. 

That’s another reason he’s not anxious to get out there. 

“I don’t have a fuckin’ clue,” he says, and Lup laughs. “I’m thinking like— okay so, we could maybe— I think— actually I have nothing. Lup, what the fuck are we gonna say to this dude?”

“We could start by just telling him the truth.”

“Yeah, I’m sure that’ll go over real well.”

“Do you have a better plan?” Lup asks. Taako groans, and opens up his book again. “That’s what I thought. Besides, I’m an expert at winging it, and you can think on your feet. We’ll be fine.” She shuffles over and writes down a couple notes. “And hey. If it doesn’t work out, and it isn’t a coincidence, we’ll see him again next cycle.”

Taako musters a laugh, and Lup lets it go even though she can tell his heart’s not in it. He flips the book to the front page and goes over the list of names written on this inside. Library name, requested by, and name of librarian. The last line has his name, and Kravitz's name, and (Taako assumes) is in Kravitz’s handwriting. 

He really, really wanted this to be a coincidence. Most of the reason he’s holding it together is the ability to not think about the people they’re leaving behind after they run. Someone— the same someone— popping up every few cycles puts a damper in that plan that Taako’s not too sure how to face yet. 

The next morning, when they head out, Taako takes the book with him. If nothing else, it’s evidence he can show to Kravitz to back up this story he has no reason to believe. 

Taako is ready to give up after like thirty minutes, so it’s pretty lucky that Kravitz finds them before they find him. The streets are just starting to get busy enough that it’s hard to find people, and it’s too hot outside (it’s always too fucking hot outside in this world), and Taako’s about to suggest they retreat and focus on the light when a voice down the street calls his name. 

“Taako? Taako! Taako—” 

Taako spins on his feet to face the sound of the voice, blinking at Kravitz, who halts a couple feet in front of him, mildly out of breath. 

“...Kravitz?” 

He nods, unnaturally quickly, glancing between him and Lup. He looks harried, stressed; he has bags under his eyes where there weren’t any before. Lup’s presence seems to make it worse, but he doesn’t wait for either of them to say anything. 

“I’ve been trying to find you since yesterday morning, I— I remember the library and the square and—” Kravitz’s hands shake. “I remember three lives. And I don’t— I mean I don’t know who you are, really, but you’re the only common factor and I—” He takes a breath in, and stands a little straighter. “I want an explanation. Who you are?”

Taako exchanges a glance with Lup, and then says, “If you were just gonna come find— come track us down, why didn’t you just, uh, just say something when I talked to you at the tavern?”

“Because I didn’t— I wasn’t lying. I didn’t know— remember? Look, the other day I was— since you came up and talked to me, and knew my name, I’ve had— I mean it’s only been twice but I’ve had these _dreams_ that feel more like memories than anything else, of these two other, different versions of me and I— I just want know what’s going on. I’m not even positive that they’re not just weird dreams but—”

Taako listens to Kravitz stumble onwards for a second more, and then pulls the library book out of his bag. Kravitz stops talking as soon as he see it, and stares at it like it has fangs. The recognition is unmistakable.

“You might want to come back with us to our ship,” says Lup. 

“Ship?” says Kravitz, and Lup nods. Before Kravitz can inquire further, Taako cuts in. 

“I know we, uh, sound like we know what’s going on. Maybe.” He laughs, but it’s all nerves and no humour. “We probably uh— we’re kind of only a little, uh, only a little less in the dark than you are. It’ll be a long story, and prob— maybe not one to have in the middle of a busy street.” 

Kravitz looks between them again, and then sets his jaw and nods. “I have time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have 'choose not to use archive warnings' because there's gonna be some character death because... that's what happens in stolen century canon. but since they don't really stay dead i didn't wanna tag it like that? anyway. i've hopefully tagged everything for future chapters so that i don't surprise anyone, but i'm playing fast and loose with both canon and my fic outline so we'll see. I'll update the tags as soon as I know what's going on. 
> 
> i personally would categorize this as reincarnation au and soulmate au but i'm not going by regular fanfic trope rules for either of those (especially soulmates like soulmates aren't an established Thing™ but like. for Reasons i would still call this a soulmate au), just the concepts. I also didn't check to see if this idea has been done to death bc i am sure it is but i don't want to know jdhghfgjhdj
> 
> This is my first go at a multi-chapter in like four years, so I'm going to try for a once a week update but I'm a full time uni student so I may have to change that. The current plan is eight chapters and two short interludes that will hopefully go up between regular update times. also i'm so sorry i don't have a beta and i also have never heard of proofreading. 
> 
> title is from owl city's thunderstruck and one day i will get a better one but this is where we're at as authors sometimes
> 
> you can find me on tumblr @crewmanjeeter!


	2. Man on the Ground

Kravitz takes his tea with one sugar and one cream.

He’d declined the offer of something to eat, which is rough news for Taako, who would much rather be doing things to distract himself while they lay out their situation for Kravitz. It’s easier (like everything is) if he doesn’t think about it. Cooking is good for that— not all consuming, so he can talk while he does it, but easy to focus on if he doesn’t feel like wholeheartedly engaging. 

Which he rarely does. 

They’d talked while the kettle was boiling, given Kravitz the most basic description of what they do and why. He’d spent the explanation in silence, even when Taako and Lup had talked over each other— the first time he’d spoken was to comment on the amount of sugar Taako was putting in his tea. 

(Six heaping tablespoons, which wasn’t excessive, no matter what Kravitz said. And then Lucretia had the audacity to agree with him, so Taako had put a seventh one in out of spite, but now it’s too sweet— not that he’s is going to stop drinking it because of that. He’s an elf of principle.)

So now the four of them sit at the kitchen table of the Starblaster in silence, waiting for Kravitz to say something. His eyes still dart around the ship like they did when he first walked into it, as if he can’t quite believe it exists. 

Objectively, it makes sense that Kravitz would be silent. It’s a lot to process. Although considering it’s been Taako’s life for the past fifteen years, Taako is a little impatient. Plus, Lup had insisted they not stress Kravitz out by having all seven of them hound him at once (Davenport had insisted they should be keeping careful track of what he said, and the compromise was to let Lucretia take notes), so it was actually a pretty chill room. Aside from the chaotic argument it had taken to get this chill room. Also Taako keeps tapping his leg, which is probably not adding to the zen or helping Kravitz process their story, but that’s not his problem. 

(Well, it is, but he’s not gonna do anything about it.)

“So do you know where you’re going when you leave?” Kravitz says finally.

“Nope,” says Lup, at the same time Taako says, “Totally random.”

“And you guys do this _every_ year?” 

Taako snorts. “You make it sound like we’re uh, we’re out here for kicks. Having a sick va-cay once a year.”

“I’m going to take that as a yes.” Kravitz takes a sip of his tea, and Taako looks down at his own mug, fingers curling tight around it despite the heat. Can Kravitz just hurry the fuck up and get through his questions so they can start asking him ab— 

“What happened those years you were there, was that because you didn’t get the uhm, the Light of Creation in time?”

Taako can’t help it; he laughs. It’s not even that it’s funny, because it’s really, really not. But man, would Taako ever love to think the Hunger rolling by and fucking things up a little was the worst case scenario. 

Lup kicks him under the table. Taako stops laughing, and squashes the pang of guilt he feels at Kravitz’s sudden apprehension.

“I am not going to like this answer, am I?” says Kravitz, and it’s a good attempt at a joke, Taako will give him that, but his voice is too strained for it to land properly. Lucretia and Lup both have a decency Taako has stopped having time for and give Kravitz a sympathetic look. 

“Nope,” says Taako. 

“That’s uh…” Lup pauses for a second. “That’s sort of our best case scenario.”

Kravitz blinks, and darts his eyes between the three of them, as though waiting for someone to say that she’s joking. When no one does, he stares back down at his mug before saying, “Do I want to know what the worst case scenario is?”

“Well,” says Lup, “Generally speaking, the Hunger, uh, eats the world.”

Kravitz’s mug hits the table with unnecessary force; he’s lucky none of the tea spills over the top. “...Eats it?”

“Watch the mug,” says Taako. 

“Eats it?” repeats Kravitz. “You did say it eats it, right? I didn’t imagine that?”

“Yeah dude. It uh— I mean we don’t know much about how it— what exactly it does, but uh, it just sort of… absorbs it. If we don’t get the Light? Just takes— takes everything in that world. Then the Hunger gets b— stronger, and then we do it again.” Rinse repeat. Taako takes a sip of his own tea, not looking at the expression of growing horror on Kravitz’s face. 

Explaining this is exhausting. Kravitz occupying this weird space between the Starblaster crew and the people on the worlds they visit is exhausting— he lacks all of the resignation that Taako has about their situation, but because he’s come back three fucking times, it’s not like Taako can ignore him. He might not go away at the end of the year. 

Or he might. 

That’s sort of the issue; Taako doesn’t know. Kravitz doesn’t know. None of them know anything. 

Fuck, at least with everything else, Taako knew where he stood. 

“Have you found it this year?” 

“No, not yet.” Lucretia looks tired and she looks over at Lup, who’s wearing a matching exhausted look. “But we still have five months, give or take a few weeks, to find it.” Her voice is flat; the three of them know, like the rest of the crew does, that they should have found the Light months ago. Lup and Barry keep at the triangulation, but their calculations are flawless now; the Light just isn’t there. There’s just empty desert where the Light should have been.

“Can I help?”

Taako narrows his eyes at Kravitz. Davenport’s concerns about Kravitz being part of the Hunger resurface, and when he looks over at Lup and Lucretia, he knows they’re thinking the same thing. “Why?”

Kravitz laughs. When that doesn’t get a response, he says, “Oh, you’re being serious? Shit. I mean I was hoping ‘you just told me my whole world would get eaten’ would be enough motivation, but—”

“Don’t take it personally,” says Lup, raising her mug, realizing it’s empty, and putting it back down. “It’s just that. Well, we don’t know who you are.” She grabs Taako’s mug and takes a sip before he can tell her off for it, and immediately wrinkles her nose. “Taako, this is disgusting. Anyway. Kravitz. We sort of have this ‘find the Light’ thing worked out, so—”

“So it normally takes you seven months then?”

There’s about three seconds of silence, and then Lup laughs. “You can start talking shit when your world gets swallowed alive by— Taako the joke you’re about to make? Don’t.”

“Okay, but I did already think it and I— I am gonna tell Magnus later.”

Lup sighs. “Look. There are only two things we know that can travel the way we do, other than us.” she says. “Those two things are the Light of Creation and the Hunger. And of the two, the Light isn’t really… I don’t want to say it’s not living because it might actually be living but it’s more contained. And we understand it better.” Marginally better, anyway. Not significantly enough to really matter, but Kravitz doesn’t have to know that. “And it doesn’t change the way the Hunger does.”

“Is this going somewhere?”

“We think you might be part of Hunger,” says Lucretia. “We have no reason to trust that you aren’t here to get information or otherwise compromise us and we know so little about… well, about everything that it seems better to err on the side of caution vis a vis trusting random strangers, even if they do keep on popping up over and over again.”

Kravitz blinks at this, looking between the three of them before deadpanning, “I mean, I’m not.” He stares for a minute and then presses forwards with, “I don’t know what you want me to say to that, other than as far as I know I’m not.”

“So if— If you’re not the Hunger, why are you here again?” says Taako. He doesn’t mean it to sound accusatory, except he kind of does.

“I—” Kravitz’s hands visibly tighten around his mug, and his shoulders tense. “I don’t know. I was hoping your story would shed some light but it…” he trails off. “I don’t understand why I’m here. Or why I remember—”

“Maybe we can fill in from our end,” Lucretia cuts him off before he can get going, and Taako watches his grip on the mug loosen ever so slightly. “What do you remember? Or actually— can you explain what you meant when you told Lup and Taako you didn’t remember before but you remember now?”

Kravitz sighs. “Yeah. I’m not sure how much of my rushed explanation made sense—”

“None of it,” interjects Taako. 

“—Okay. I said I didn’t remember before because I didn’t. As far as I knew yesterday, I had never seen you before. And then I went to sleep and it was like… It feels like someone dumped all the memories back into my head while I was sleeping. I don’t feel like I was missing them before or anything, but they definitely are... my memories. My memories of living on a planet with six moons and my memories of running a library and my memories becoming friends with the man who ran the booth next to me at the marketplace and my memories of these two other versions of me that are not my life as it is now but somehow, undeniably, are me.” Kravitz takes a deep breath.

“Normally I would’ve just chalked it up to a weird dream,” he continues, “But that’s a little hard to do when the elf you talked to the day before is in both sets of otherwise totally unrelated memories. And then I had thought it could be a spell of some kind—” Kravitz pauses for a second, and looks down at his mug, “—and honestly I still think it might be, but I had no other lead besides finding you again. And I think what’s weirder is I remember— I remember this happening. Last time, I guess. I remember waking up and remembering being a librarian, but it was the only time that had happened and I couldn’t figure out what could have possibly triggered it so after awhile I… just let it go.”

Silence follows this explanation, aside from the sound of Lucretia’s pen furiously skating across her notebook page to get it all down. 

“You remem— you remember two full lives?” asks Taako finally. “Like, being born and then living and— and growing up and eve— ev— one day dying?”

“Yes— well. Not in full detail. I don’t think anyone uh, remembers being born, and things at the beginning and the... end of those lives —I guess— are for the most part blurry or distant, and the only part in sharp focus that I can recall clearly are— well, the bits with you, Taako.” Kravitz looks almost embarrassed to say so, like he’d just admitted a middle school crush as opposed to accusing Taako of being the source of his weird memory bullshit. 

Lucretia and Lup look over at Taako, and he tries and fails to ignore them both for a second before snapping, “What? You think I— I have any— I know what’s fucking happening?” Making sipping tea an angry action isn’t easy, but Taako tries to make it work. “Maybe it’s— maybe I’m just incredibly gorgeous and funny. Maybe that’s— that’s why his memories are focused on me. Ever think of that one?” 

“We can always ask. Kravitz, do you think your memories are just because Taako is—” Lup raises her hands to make air quotes. “—’just incredibly gorgeous and funny’?” Taako kicks her shin under the table, but it barely puts a dent in her sardonic grin, although she does mutter ‘ow’ under her breath. Taako will take it. 

“Uh,” says Kravitz. 

“You can say no. He won’t be offended.”

“I wo— I will be a little offended,” says Taako, and Kravitz lets out a strained laugh. “I’m serious,” says Taako, and Kravitz stops laughing and traces Taako’s expression with his eyes. He must find what he’s looking for— some indication that Taako is joking, presumably— because he relaxes a little before continuing. 

“I do think they’re surrounding you, but I somehow think it might be a little more than that. I have no idea why exactly, but I don’t think just being, uhm, gorgeous and funny is reason enough for someone else’s memories to bend around you.”

“But—” says Taako, leaning forwards in his chair. “—but. You— you do think I’m gorgeous and funny, huh?” 

“Uh,” says Kravitz again. 

“I’m ju— I’m just fucking with you.” He sits back again, expression melting into an easy grin. “It’s fine. I already— I know I am already, so.” 

Kravitz gives a nervous smile before drinking from his mug for what’s frankly a very long time. 

“Okay,” says Lucretia, while Taako tries to parse where the sudden tension came from, “So our common factor is Taako. Although we’re short on data, so it could potentially be any Starblaster crew member, and Kravitz just ran into you first both times, Taako. I can’t think of anything specific about you that would trigger any interdimensional activity that wouldn’t also apply to the rest of us.”

“I’m not special, I ge— I get it.” 

“You know that’s not what I’m saying,” sighs Lucretia, and Taako snickers. 

“Can I ask— How many years has it been since I saw you last?” Taako’s gaze snaps from Lucretia to Kravitz. Kravitz looks like he’s staring through Taako instead of at him, and his expression is as full of nerves as ever. “In the marketplace. You were there in the summer?”

“Very specific. I’m, uh, I’m flattered.” Taako flashes a grin, but doesn’t wait for Kravitz to react to the joke before answering. “Uh, two years.”

“No.”

“No?” asks Lucretia, at the same time as Taako says, “Uh, yeah. I was there.”

“It can’t have been just two years,” insists Kravitz. 

“Lemme just—Hold on. Hold on. You’re willing to accept we can space travel and— and jump, uh, fuck I dunno like, whole realities— that’s all fine and good by Kravitz, but that it’s only been two years, that’s, uh, that’s too much? That’s what bothers you about this whole—“ Taako waves his hands at the room around them. “—about this whole thing?”

“No— yes—” Kravitz sighs, letting go of his mug to rub his eyes. “You don’t… Okay. I remember, or dreamed, but since you know what I’m talking about, we’ll assume it’s memories, I remember you being there in the marketplace… And then— I mean I guess I did uhm, die, a bit early, but it wasn’t for another thirty years after that.” 

Taako blinks. “Wait— how can you have lived another thirty— thirty years if you— if I just saw you two years ago?” Kravitz did mention experiencing two full lifetimes, so the implication of, you know, living the whole rest of them, was there. 

But that didn’t really make any fucking sense now, did it. 

“That is what my issue was, yes,” says Kravitz. 

“Well,” says Lucretia, jotting something down in her notebook, “There’s no indication that our path is linear.” When silence greets her, she looks up. “I mean there’s no reason Kravitz couldn’t have lived thirty years and we only experienced it as two cycles. We really don’t know very much about how the Starblaster chooses where it goes. If it’s picking a random place, it could also be picking a random time.”

“Your theory is that it’s totally random, but that we— we somehow found the same dude, uh, three times?”

Lucretia shrugs, looking back down at her notebook. “Taako, if you have a better one, I am all ears.”

Taako doesn’t, so he downs the rest of his tea. 

“Can we go back to the ‘the whole world will get eaten if you don’t find the Light’ thing please?” 

“We will,” insists Lup. “We will find it. It’s just somewhere out in the sand—”

“Oh,” says Kravitz. “Oh, oh no it’s not. There’s a reason there’s very little travel over the deserts, and why the towns are only built on solid rock.”

“And why’s that, is there a big giant sand monster out there?” Sarcasm practically bleeds from Taako’s question. Kravitz presses his lips into a line, and raises his eyebrows. “There— there is, isn’t there,” says Taako. Kravitz nods. “Fuckin’ fantastic. Great. What kinda fuckin’ sand monster?” 

“They’re called coins, most of the time. They’re sort of circular and flat, around ten feet in diameter, a foot or so— thick, I guess? They move through the sand with sort of like, fins on the side. They don’t have any eyes so they rely on sound waves and vibrations to know where things are. They’re about half mouth, and carnivores. If you don’t touch the sand and manage to stay twenty or so feet above it you’re fine, but…” Kravitz trails off. “Stuff on the sand— vehicles, objects, people— tend to be snapped up pretty quick.”

“And by ‘snapped up’, you mean—”

“Eaten. I definitely mean eaten. Or taken underground, since they have burrows there”

“Everything?” asks Lucretia. “The Light has some odd properties, and it’s not really edible— I mean we’ve never tried to eat it so we wouldn’t know for sure but is that… the only option?”

Kravitz chews his bottom lip. “There is one spot that it could be if it hasn’t been eaten or taken underground. Or a couple in the same area. There are some rocks too small for people to live on, and easy enough for the coins to get up onto. Some of them… collect junk. Stuff that I assume couldn’t be digested or wasn’t food. It’s sort of a delicate situation because while you can get lucky elsewhere in the desert, and they avoid the cities now because there's so many structures to keep them out under the surrounding sand, but those rocks... they’re pretty much always there.”

“But we could try?” asks Lup. 

“Yes, we could.” Kravitz sees Lup about to say something again and rushes into his next sentence. “I want to help. I know we don’t have much reason to trust each other. I could definitely be under a spell right now— although to what end, I can’t imagine— and you think I’m… whatever that thing is. But if what you’re saying is true, then I can help. I live here. I’ve travelled across the desert before, I know how to avoid the coins and how they behave. While there’s probably people with slightly more expertise out there, I’m here, I already know your story, and I am definitely willing to work with you here so my whole world doesn’t get destroyed.”

Taako exchanges a look with Lup, and then a less informative but still adequate look with Lucretia. Lucretia closes her notebook and stands up from the table. 

“That seems like a good solution to me, but we’ll have to make the decision as a crew, which means I need to go update the rest of them.” She clears her throat and when she speaks again, it’s much louder and more enunciated. “Which means I’m walking to the door now, and will be there to open it in about ten seconds.”

“Magnus,” says Taako instantly. 

“Fuck you, that was mine.” Lup curses, and then says, “Okay, Merle.”

“What?” asks Kravitz. Lucretia heads out and closes the door behind her. Rushed chatter begins outside instantly, although everyone’s talking over each other so much they can’t make it out through the door. 

“We’re betting on who was eavesdropping,” explains Lup.

“Oh.” Kravitz glances towards the door, and then back at the twins. “Can I guess too?”

“If you got one, lay it on us.”

“The guy wearing the jeans is Barry, right? Him.”

“Bold move,” says Lup. 

“I’m into it. I think he’s onto something,” says Taako, before pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. “Well. We have ten minutes to kill and that’s uh, that’s enough time to get some, some cookies on.” He starts pulling out some ingredients and a mixing bowl. “Kravitz, do you like chocolate chip or double fudge?”

“Chocolate chip I guess,” says Kravitz. “Although I’m not sure you have enough time to make cookies right now.” 

Taako clicks his tongue and ignores Kravitz’s comment about time. “Chocolate chip it is.”

Kravitz props an elbow up on the table and leans his head into his hand. “I… don’t understand a single thing that is going on.” 

“That’s fair.” Taako starts measuring out sugar. “We rarely do. Lup, you made the— where did you— the chocolate chips aren’t uh, aren’t in the cupboard.”

“No, I moved them, do you really need them?”

“Do I... need chocolate— chocolate chips to make chocolate chip cookies? Uh— is this— is this a trick question?”

Lup groans, and then gets to her feet. “Fine, I’ll go get them.” 

“Are they… are they not in the kitchen?”

“They’re in my room.” She heads towards the door, not sparing a glance until her hand is on the doorknob and Taako’s speaking up again. 

“Why are they in your— Have you— have you just been eating straight chocolate chips? Is this why we’re always— always fuckin’ out of them?”

Lup shrugs, and doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed of herself. “A girl’s gotta eat.” She slips out of the room before Taako can inject something else. 

There’s a couple seconds of silence, and then Taako says, “Can you fucking believe this shit?”

“Honestly,” says Kravitz, “It’s a nice change to some normalcy.”

Taako looks at where Lup has left the room, and then back at Kravitz, who’s still clutching his mug (presumably empty) like it’s the only solid thing he has at the moment. 

“You get used to it.”

“Funnily enough that’s not comforting.”

Taako shrugs, dumping the sugar into the mixing bowl. “Has to be,” he says shortly. Silence follows this; it’s clear that Taako wasn’t really talking about Kravitz. The silence stretches on into Taako can’t keep his eyes focused on his mixing bowl any longer. “So. What do you, uh, do?” 

Kravitz is staring at him when he looks up. 

“What?”

“Nothing, I just— every conversation I’ve had today has given me emotional whiplash.” Kravitz sees Taako open his mouth to interject and keeps talking. “That’s not— I would much rather do small talk than anything else. I uh, I make maps. I’ve travelled a lot and— well, people need to know where they’re going so they can plan their trips without dying and… I suppose you could just head south and hope, but that doesn’t cut it for everyone.”

Taako whistles. “You weren’t kidding about the, uh, the whole expertise thing.” Everything about Kravitz’s existence (the timing, his knowledge, his skills, everything) seems to be perfectly tuned to what they need, and if Taako’s honest, it freaks him out a little bit. Makes him seem less like some random person who got caught up in this interdimensional travel bullshit and more like an active participant in some way. 

Except Kravitz doesn’t actually know what’s going on. So it’s more like they’re being deliberately fucked with. Maybe he’ll ask Merle to ring Pan and ask what gives. 

Kravitz furrows his brow. “What, that I’m willing to offer it?”

“That you have it in the first place.”

“You’re looking at me like you want answers, and I don’t have any.” 

“I know.” Is it bad if he casts Zone of Truth again just to double check or something? Should they have already been making sure he’s telling the truth? If he was telling the truth yesterday, what is there to lie about now? “You— you have to admit, though,” says Taako, “It is all pretty uh, pretty odd.”

“A wizard and six of his friends who can travel through dimensions and also, apparently, to some extent, time, come to my town and the wizard announces he knows me, which suddenly prompts weird dreams of past lives that I lived, and now I have to help them all find a glorified bouncy ball or risk my world getting eaten.” Kravitz raises an eyebrow. “You’re right. Very odd.”

“Oh sure, make it all about you, that’s fine.”

Kravitz laughs. An actual, open, genuine laugh, not the half hearted laughs stemmed from nerves Taako’s been hearing all morning. It’s the most relaxed he’s been since he got here, and sue Taako, Kravitz has a nice laugh and he wants to hear more of it. 

“What do you do other, uh, other than plot convenient jobs?” Taako grabs a spatula. “Any fun hobbies?”

“I play the lyre.”

Taako almost comments that he already knows that, but bites his tongue at the last second. “You any good?”

“I mean, I’m not going to brag, but I would like to think so.” Kravitz’s shoulders are losing their tension a little. “I certainly invest enough time into it that it would be, uh, sort of embarrassing now if I wasn’t at least halfway decent.” 

Taako laughs, and then says, as though it’s something to be proud of, “I can play the recorder.”

“Oh? Is this because they make you learn to play Hot Cross Buns on the recorder in Fantasy Elementary School?” Kravitz tries to look serious, but Taako can see the corners of his mouth twitch up into a smile. 

“Maybe." Taako pulls out a bag of flour from the bottom cupboard and puts it up on the counter. “Listen. I may not— we can’t all be, uh, musically inclined.”

“Well, we can, it’s just a matter of practice and time. Every skill is.” 

Taako shakes his head. “Not cooking. My uh, my culinary skills are de—demon pacts and dark, uh, dark magic all the way down, homie.” 

Kravitz laughs again, and Taako’s not surprised he’s a bard because that laugh is music to Taako’s ears—

Oof. Taako turns his back to Kravitz to fill his measuring cup with water, trying to delete that thought from his head. It’s one thing to acknowledge Kravitz is cute (well, cute, devastatingly handsome, you know), and another to start thinking weird sappy shit about him. They barely even know each other. 

And more important, Kravitz probably won’t exist in five months. 

Maybe. 

He hopes not. Or maybe he hopes so. It’s hard to be sure. 

Kravitz clears his throat. “What about you, what do you do? Other than play the recorder.”

“I’m the chef.”

“Really?”

Taako puts down his spatula. “How— how is that surprising.”

“It just seems like a sort of— not the kind of job I would expect be required with a crew of only seven.”

“We gotta eat,” says Taako. Kravitz blinks, and then shrugs, and Taako laughs. “Nah I’m just— just joking. I mean, I am a chef. But me ‘n Lup, uh, we’re here to study arcana. Or were. Now it’s— it’s mostly the chef gig.” There is a lot to study in these worlds, Taako supposes, but it’s not really a science mission anymore. Just a survival one. They have more things to worry about now.

The door swings open before Kravitz has a chance to respond. Taako looks up, expecting Lup with his chocolate chips, but all six of the remainder of the crew pile into the room.

“Lup, did you bring the chocolate chips?” Taako says, over the sudden chatter as everyone finds a spot to sit (he hits Magnus’s shoulder as Magnus tries to sit on the counter, and Magnus sticks his tongue out before settling for leaning against it).

Lup blinks, and then gives a sheepish smile. “I forgot. Oops.” 

“How did you forg— how did you forget the one fucking thing you were supposed to—“

“Everyone was standing in the hallway and I got distracted,” protests Lup, and Taako glares when Merle snickers.

“Okay,” says Davenport, trying to reign everyone’s attention in. Kravitz’s hands are clutching his mug tightly again; Taako regrets not offering him another cup of tea, if only so he had something to during this. “Can we please—“

“Oh, also,” interrupts Lucretia, “neither of you were right.” She glances between Taako and Lup. “Barry was the one eavesdropping behind the door. He didn’t stand up fast enough and I just about swung that sucker right into his head.” 

Taako snorts at that mental image, and then looks over at Kravitz, who, despite his returning nerves, looks rather pleased with himself. 

“Beginner’s luck,” says Taako.

“Maybe I’m just an excellent judge of character,” retorts Kravitz. 

“I don’t think it should count,” says Barry, “Magnus made me so that Taako would lose the bet—”

“Yeah ‘cause it’s always me and I know you guys want to hear what’s going on and I don’t think—”

“Okay!” says Davenport again, before muttering, not very quietly, “it’s like herding cats.”

“You can’t say that,” says Taako, “I’m— I’m gonna tell uh, tell HR.”

“We don’t have an HR department,” says Davenport. 

“We have Merle.”

“How is Merle anything like an HR department?” says Davenport, while Merle says, “HR? Since when am I HR?”

Taako waves his spatula around, accidentally launching some of the not quite fully mixed batter a couple feet where it sticks to a cupboard door. “You— you’re supposed to be in charge of like, healing and shit, so shouldn’t— shouldn’t— doesn’t that make you, uh, you in charge of our general well-being?”

“Yes, because he’s so good at the healing part of his job,” says Magnus. Taako silently offers a high five, which Magnus accepts enthusiastically. 

“Hey!” says Merle. “I can be HR if I want! Davenport, you can’t say— wait, what did he say that was the problem?”

Davenport pinches the bridge of his nose and inhales deeply, before electing to just start talking over everyone and hope they get the hint. 

“Kravitz,” he says, “It sounds sort of like you’ve been caught up in some interplaner travel by accident.” It’s said without much conviction; this is the solution they’ve arrived on, because there aren’t any others, but he definitely doesn’t like it. “Or at least you’re not aware that it’s happening.”

Kravitz nods. “I’d considered that I might be under a spell,” he says, although he barely sounds more convinced than Davenport. 

Barry coughs. “I mean, the good news is if you’re under a spell, or otherwise affected by magic, we can check for that.” He extends a hand palm up on the table. Kravitz stares at it. 

Lup sighs. “He needs physical contact to cast the spell— I think he’s casting Identify.” 

“Wasn’t that obvious?”

“No,” says Kravitz, “No it really wasn’t.” After another second, he tentatively extends his own hand and touches his fingers to Barry’s. 

Barry closes his eyes a lot to concentrate on spells. Most of the time, it’s an inconvenience that Takao and Lup make fun of him for, but it has the side effect of making him look at least mildly creepy; face carefully blank, eyes closed, insisting on touching Kravitz’s hand (yes, it’s a requirement of the spell, no that doesn’t really make it better). It’s a full minute before he’s done, and no one moves in that time. 

Barry opens his eyes, withdrawing his hand. “Nothing. In terms of being affected by magic, Kravitz is just a regular guy.”

“Were the theatrics necessary?” asks Kravitz.

“What?”

“You know what, nevermind, I’ll just assume they were.” 

“That wasn’t theatrical,” insists Barry. Aside from Taako snickering, no one responds to him. 

“So if it’s not magic,” says Lucretia, “Not directly, in any case, and if Kravitz isn’t in control of it, we might as well accept his help. He’s given us the only lead we’ve gotta all year on the Light.” 

“Yes,” says Davenport, “Lucretia mentioned what you said about the creatures, that live in the sand, the, uh…”

“Coins,” says Kravitz. “There’s probably a scientific term, but I don’t know it, everyone I talk to just calls them that because they’re, uh, sort of sand coloured and circular, like a coin.”

“Very creative,” says Merle. 

“I mean— that's hardly fair. It’s not like it was my idea.”

“What if gave them a new name? Like we just called them all Derek?” asks Magnus.

“You would sound like an idiot, but what’s new I guess,” deadpans Lucretia, and Lup snorts. 

“There’s uhm, some spots in the desert where the rocks are small enough and thin enough that they can still get up onto it without issue and sense things on it. Some of them collect… stuff.” Kravitz hesitates, and then says, “They’re at least sort of intelligent. We’ve never been able to communicate in any way, and they really only see other living things as food, but inorganic things are sometimes kept."

Davenport nods. “Where are they?”

“The rocks? I can— uh, I can draw a map of the three main ones. Does anyone have paper?”

Lucretia flips to the back of her notebook and tears out a page, handing it and her pen over to Kravitz. Once he takes them, she reaches into the pocket of her robes and pulls out another pen for herself. 

“Thanks,” says Kravitz, and starts drawing rough circles on the paper, pointing them out as he goes. “Okay, so if this here is us, there are three small clusters of rocks to the north, northeast, and southwest. Generally, those are the only places anything missing would be if it’s not underground.”

“What if it is underground?” asks Barry. “The Light, I mean.”

Kravitz makes a face that tells everyone all they need to know. 

“Let’s worry about that when it happens.” Davenport studies the crude map. “It’s still kind of early, how far away are these?”

“About a day’s travel each from here,” says Kravitz. “Although I don’t actually know how fast this ship travels.”

“Probably faster than whatever you’ve got.” There’s a hint of pride in Davenport’s voice. “If it works for you, we’ll just go now.”

Kravitz hesitates, and then shrugs. “I’m my own boss, so I supposed I could take the day off.”

“Great. We go, we look around for the Light, we grab it, and we drop you back home. Sound good to everyone?” Davenport waits for the general noises of agreement from his crew before heads towards the door. 

“Oh,” says Kravitz, and Davenport turns back around. “Just, we should probably avoid walking on the sand or the rocks before we know the Light is there.”

Davenport gestures around. “We didn’t take a ship incapable of hovering. Let’s get moving, and hopefully we can have the Light by tonight.”

They may not be a day’s travel away, but it’s still a few hours before they reach their destination; it turns out Kravitz is decent at poker, although not better than Merle. Taako eventually just retrieves the chocolate chips from Lup’s room himself, finishes the batter and puts his cookies in the oven. Kravitz stays with him in the kitchen while he does.

“How are you— uh, how are you holding up?” Taako asks, partly out of a sense of obligation and partly because he does, for some reason he doesn’t want to think too hard about, want to make sure Kravitz is good. 

“Overwhelmed, but better than I expected.” Kravitz sighs, looking at the cookies through the oven door. “At this point it’s sort of just a feeling of ‘why not’, you know?”

“Yeah,” says Taako, “Welcome aboard.”

Kravitz laughs, and Taako wishes he didn’t like the sound so much. 

Or maybe he wishes he could hear it again. 

It’s hard to tell. 

When they can see from the ship that the first collection of rocks has almost nothing on top of them. A couple random pieces of metal with odd angles, and something that looks suspiciously like the basket from a hot air balloon. Kravitz shifts when he sees it, eyes darting around the sand, which is still as ever. 

It’s well into the afternoon, almost evening, by the time they reach the second cluster of rocks. That too is mostly empty, although cluttered enough that they circle around a couple times to double check. Taako is pulling the cookies out of the oven when Kravitz asks him a question. 

“How big is the Light?”

Taako exhales, putting down the cookie sheet and holding out his hands as a demonstration of approximate size. “Something like that?”

“Oh good, I was afraid we were looking for a marble or something.” 

Taako laughs. “We would have— we would have definitely given up by now if it was that small.” He grabs a cookie, blowing on it before popping the whole thing into his mouth. It is incredibly hot, but (as always) is flawless, taste-wise. "Cook—" Taako has to cover his mouth so that none of the cookie falls out. "Cookies— hot— done though," he says. 

"Did you burn your tongue?"

"No." 

Kravitz laughs, and behind his hand, Taako smiles. 

The sun starts dropping below the horizon on their way to the third and final cluster of rocks. The temperature drops with it; however hot it is in the day, this place becomes a freezer when it gets dark. 

Which doesn’t matter inside the Starblaster, but might matter when they actually arrive at their destination. If the Light is even there.

Kravitz tries a cookie when they cool down. "You know it's very stressful that you're watching me," he says beforehand, gaze flicking back and forth between the cookie and Taako. "I don't know how you want me to react."

"Just eat— just try the cookie, Kravitz."

Kravitz takes a bite of the cookie. His eyes widen, but unlike Taako, he waits until he's done to give his review. "These are really good," he says, before eating the remainder of the cookie and reaching for another. 

"'Course they are," says Taako, feeling maybe a little more pride than is warranted. He's trying not to think about that either. 

It’s just past dusk when they get there. Unlike the previous two clusters, whatever monster drops things here has to be a hoarder; every rock is piled high with random junk. They’re circling around for fifteen minutes peering out the windows into the dark in (mostly) silence before anyone says anything.

“That one!” Magnus leans forward a bit, pointing. “That really tall pile has something glowing in it, I think that’s the Light.” 

Taako peers over where Magnus is looking, and spots the glowing light easily— nightfall may have helped rather than hindered them. 

“He’s— Magnus is right, I think that’s it,” he says, and without further discussion, Davenport brings them in, setting the Starblaster on autopilot before joining them at the entrance.

The Starblaster hovers over the sand, close enough the rock that it’s a small drop, but easily jumpable if they wanted to. As soon as the entrance is open, Taako leans forwards to have a better look at the environment; empty and still, like both before it. Taako can feel the chill in the air through his robe. 

“Don’t get off,” Kravitz puts a hand out to prevent Taako from walking forwards.

“Only do that in my quarters,” says Taako, smiling when Magnus snorts behind him. “Uh-thank you. I— I thought it was a g— it was funny too. What’s happening out there?”

“It blends in really well— do you have something we can throw out there to make sure the coast in clear? Something you’re okay with losing?”

“Merle,” says Magnus.

“Hey!” 

“I mean, to be fair,” starts Barry, “We’ll come back if we go out there. Our shit won’t.”

“Oh for fuck’s sakes,” says Taako, and starts unbuttoning his IPRE robe. “Here. I’ll get a new one next year. Hurry up though it’s— I’m fuckin’ cold here.” He’s still wearing slacks, as they work best with the robe (and also technically are regulation, but Magnus wears sweats and Barry wears jeans and Davenport has all but given up on them following regulation), but his torso’s only covered a tank top, and the fabric isn’t very thick either. He bundles his robe up and hands it to Kravitz, who fixes his gaze about two inches in front of Taako.

“Okay,” says Kravitz finally, and both the night and Kravitz’s skin are too dark to be sure, but Taako almost thinks he’s blushing. “Okay. Uh, this might not be heavy enough so if nothing happens I say we try something else just in case but—“

“Can you just do whatever it is that you’re doing?” interrupts Lup. Kravitz sighs, and bundles up the robe, before lobbing it onto the rock. It partway unfurls in the air, and lands about twenty feet from the Starblaster.

“Nice shot,” says Merle.

“Thank you.”

Nothing happens for a moment. 

And then, nothing happens for another moment. And another. And another.

After around a minute, Taako sighs. “Okay. What is—”

The sand shifts suddenly, enough to silence everyone again. Kravitz raises a flat palm in a silent ‘wait’ gesture. Not that anyone was about to just roll out after that. 

One more silent moment stretches on ad nauseam.

Without any noise besides the shifting sand, a mottled beige creature rises to the surface, and after a moment, throws itself (somewhat sloppily) up onto the rock. 

It’s easily fifteen feet across, scuttling forward in a way that makes Taako’s skin crawl, moving much faster than a creature of that size and shape should be able to move. Taako gets the impression that even that high speed is paltry compared to how fast it would move in the sand. 

It opens something that looks more like a tear than a mouth; impossibly jagged teeth that stretch across far too much of its body, and snaps up Taako’s IPRE robe. A flash of red, and it’s vanished. When it closes its mouth, it doesn’t even look like there was a mouth in the first place. It holds its place for a minute that Taako doesn’t breathe for and then, quick as it came, scuttles backwards and disappears into the sand.

“Holy shit,” says Davenport. 

“Thanks, Captain.”

“You’re welcome.” 

"I thought you said they were ten feet," says Merle, "That's way bigger than ten feet."

Kravitz rubs his temple. “They're usually ten feet, but they can be bigger. We're just unlucky." He pauses. "If the Light really is there, we won’t be able to get it by foot. Also they’re not completely stupid, so they probably know we’re here now, so we’ll have to be extra careful.”

“Was that demonstration really necessary?” asks Barry. “Like, couldn’t you have just said ‘the sand monster is out there so we can’t approach by foot’ or was that just—”

“I mean considering I’ve been grilled for details and potential proof about pretty much every aspect of my life and the world I live in, forgive me for trying to get a head start on this one,” Kravitz says. 

“Point taken.” 

Taako groans, and crosses his arms as a cold wind sweeps past them through the open entrance. “Can we con— can we focus please?”

Kravitz turns from Barry, expression softening into mild guilt. “Here. Take my jacket.” Kravitz shimmies out of it; unlike Taako, he’s still wearing a long sleeve button up. “I would have thrown it out but I won’t get mine back at the end of the year.” He gives Taako the jacket, along with a nervous smile.

“Do not mind if I do.” Taako knows better than to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he slips it on. It actually almost fits. Kravitz’s shoulders are a little broader than his, and the jacket doesn’t quite reach the end of his torso, but it’s close enough to be wearable. And more importantly, it’s warm. “Much better. Thank you, my man.”

“Don’t mention it.” Kravitz’s smile becomes warm as his jacket for a moment before he looks back out across the rock. 

“When you two lovebirds are done flirting,” starts Merle (he tries to sound irritated but what comes through is that he definitely thinks it’s funny to try and ruin Taako’s life like this), “We have an actual problem to deal with.”

“Three cycles ago I watched you call a willow tree ‘darling’ and when I— when I asked you about you, you fuckin’ doubled down and implied you wa— you were gonna have a spring wedding.” 

Merle shrugs.

“Do you even ha— have any idea what to do about— about the fuckin’ sand monster that ate my jacket.”

“No.” 

“Cool so you’re interrupting my whole jam for no reason. Excellent. Thank you. Really appreciate that one.” Taako rolls his eyes and turns back to Kravitz. “Sand monster?” 

“What?”

“The sand monster,” Taako says impatiently. “What are we uh, doing about it?”

“I don’t know,” Kravitz admits. “We can’t step on the rock, since it still carries vibrations and is low enough that the coin can get up on it. The sand is worse. And the less noise we make the better, since sound waves carry too, although that’s less of an issue. We basically need to come from the air, but unless you can airdrop in without ever touching the ground or anything else until you grab the Light of Creation…” Kravitz shrugs. 

Magnus clears his throat. 

“Oh please don’t say you have a pl—” starts Lucretia, but Magnus cuts her off.

“I have a plan.”

Ten minutes later, they’re standing at the entrance to the Starblaster, Magnus tying a length of rope to his belt. The entrance is open, the ship hovering just under twenty feet fabove the big pile of Sand Monster Junk that held the Light. 

“Has anyone— have I ever told you that all your plans are st— are just like, stupid as fuck?” Taako winds and unwinds the other end of the rope around his hand, thirty feet of slack winding on the floor between them. 

Kravitz, Merle, and Lucretia stand beside them, Kravitz shifting nervously; Lucretia and Merle are both too used to this atmosphere to be bothered (or at least, Lucretia is, Taako isn’t even sure Merle is paying attention at all). 

“That’s a Magnus specialty,” says Lup through Lucretia’s stone of farspeech. Magnus grins and gives a thumbs up. 

“Magnus just did a thumbs up,” Lucretia says. Lup’s sigh crackles through the stone. “Is Davenport ready to go?”

“I can hear you.” Davenport’s voice is a little more distant than Lup’s, but still clear. “Just give me the word.”

“Cool. Uh, Mags, I can control most of your movement, but if you have to move less than like, uh, a foot, or— or two, that’s on you.” 

“Gotcha.”

“Please try not to touch anything until you can grab the Light,” starts Kravitz, and Magnus waves him off before he can finish. 

“Eh, Capn’port’s got us.”

“I’m glad you have confidence in me Magnus, but I would prefer if I didn’t have to outrun a giant sand monster.”

“No you wouldn’t,” says Barry, voice even fainter— he must be on the other side of the cockpit from Lup. "You would love piloting the ship away from a giant sand monster." Lup laughs. Davenport mumbles something unintelligible. 

“Standing by here,” says Lup. 

Taako winds the rope a couple times around his hand and puts his other hand on Magnus’s shoulder. “You go down there, you get the Light, you come back, and so help me if you pull my ass down there because of this rope, I’ll— if we die, next year I will kill you. Capisce?” 

Magnus nods and at least tries to pretend he’s not smiling. Taako scowls, and then casts Levitate on him. 

“Adios,” he says, and pushes Magnus off of the Starblaster. 

“I thought you said you can control his movements?” asks Merle. 

“Oh, I can,” says Taako. “It, uh, that— pushing him off was for kicks.”

Magnus, slowly drifting away from them, sticks out his tongue. Taako sticks out his tongue back and holds out his hand (more for show than anything, but what’s the point of magic if you don’t flourish a little), flicking his wrist downwards and sending Magnus in the direction of the junk pile. 

“Careful not to let the slack fall onto the rock,” says Kravitz. Taako casts his eyes downward at the uncoiling rope for a moment before looking back out at Magnus. Magnus stops about five feet from the junk pile and starts looking around.

Every second he’s down there feels like an eternity. Taako resists the urge to coil and uncoil the rope around his hand. Every sound makes his ears flick in its direction, which makes it sort of annoying when Merle pulls out a pack of pretzels. 

“What?” he says when Taako glares at him. 

“This should be your fuckin’ job,” Taako mutters. 

“Your spell,” retorts Merle. 

“Both of you be quiet,” says Lucretia, and Taako settles for making a rude gesture with his free hand. 

Two minutes later, Magnus finally yells up at them. “There’s a giant ruby down here. We’re rich!” 

“Can you just get the fuckin’ Light, Magnus, is that too mu— too much to ask?”

“Fine. Move me a little left.”

“Please stop talking so loud,” hisses Kravitz, as Taako waves his hand to oblige Magnus. “Sound waves are detectable and—”

“I see it! Ready?” shouts Magnus. 

“Yeah, let her rip.” 

Magnus plunges his hands into the junk. 

A few of the items go scattering immediately, tumbling out of their precarious positions and down to the base of the pile— one comically large vase manages to bounce off the rock before shattering on the sand beside it. 

The sand under the shattered vase starts to shift. Kravitz grabs Taako’s free arm but when Taako spares a second to look at him it’s clear he did it without thinking. 

“Almost got it!” yells Magnus, throwing a large tray made of some metal that at some point was probably shiny behind him and reaching back into the pile up to his shoulder. 

The sand stops shifting. Kravitz’s fingernails are digging into Taako’s arm and normally Taako would tell him off but he lets it slide this time. He’s preoccupied. 

(Kravitz is cute.)

(But it’s 90% because he’s preoccupied.)

(Okay, maybe it’s a 60/40 split in favour of preoccupied. Whatever. Semantics.)

“I got it!” Magnus withdraws his hands from the junk pile and hold his prize aloft, knocking down another few random items as he does. 

The sand does a little more than shift this time. 

The coin lets out a shriek like nails on a chalkboard, loud enough to make Taako’s ears ring, and throws itself from the sand— it’s impeded slightly by the pile of junk on this part of the rock but still moving much faster than should be natural. Taako jerks Magnus to the right and Magnus yells, quickly pulling the Light close to his body. 

“Davenport, now now now!” Behind Taako, Lucretia yells into her stone of farspeech. 

The Starblaster starts moving instantly. The slack on the floor incoils at light speed, and despite Magnus’s relatively lighter weight, when the rope snaps taut, it pulls Taako’s arm too. Pain shoots through his shoulder and something makes an sickening pop that he could have gone his whole life without having to hear. He lets out a shout before gritting his teeth. Magnus has to stay floating. The pain in his arm is getting worse by the second but he doesn’t have time right now, Magnus has to stay levitating—

He’s going to fucking kill Magnus, he really is. 

He stumbles forwards towards the open door, dragging Kravitz— still holding onto his other arm— forwards with him. Merle throws his arms around Taako’s waist and digs his heels in, and the combined weight of all three of them keeps them in the Starblaster. 

Magnus is yanked into motion by the rope pulling taut too. He looks almost ill when he’s pulled at the waist by the belt. If Davenport had accelerated any faster he could’ve snapped Magnus in two with the momentum of the ship. As is, Magnus fumbles the Light, barely recovering it before clutching it tight to his chest. The coin is being left in the dust, but it seems to realize its prize is escaping and lets out a second wail in as many minutes before diving back into the sand.

Merle scrambles for the rope and starts trying to reel Magnus in. Taking the weight off Taako’s arm throws the pain into sharp relief before it dulls. In the chaos one of Magnus’s shoes falls off (why is he wearing fucking _sandals_ , is Taako's question). Taako squints, focusing on trying to keep Magnus moving closer to them. The faster Magnus is inside the faster they can pick up speed and altitude and get the fuck out of here. The most he can do is keep making sure the rope doesn’t go taut, but since Merle is pulling Magnus in, that’s the only job he has to worry about. 

Something rumbles. Taako’s ears flick forward towards the sand, eyes tracking for some visual disturbance, but there’s nothing there. 

A second rumble, and this time loud enough to be caught by humans because Magnus twists his body to look down at the sand. 

There is approximately two more seconds of (relative) peace. 

The coin bursts from the sand underneath Magnus, propelled upwards and forwards with its own momentum, snapping its impossible mouth shut before anyone has time to react. 

It’s got hold of something— Magnus’s pants, his leg, who fucking knows— Taako’s arm is screaming the same way Magnus is and the same way Lup is through the stone demanding to know what the fuck is going on and it’s getting harder to keep concentration on this stupid fucking spell because if he drops it, that’s it for Magnus and probably Merle holding onto the rope and probably his arm—

Kravitz hums something beside him (the melody would probably be beautiful if it wasn’t so harried and also there was less screaming), and finishes his tune just as Lucretia says something, too quiet to make out. When Taako turns, her hand is outstretched and some kind of gas, like smoke but vile green instead of gray, emanates from her palm. Taako snaps her gaze back to the coin. 

Both spells hit it at once, and it lets out a final scream, letting go of Magnus and disappearing back into the sand. 

“Hey,” says Taako after a moment of silence, “Mango needs to get inside now, or else I—I’m gonna dr— he’s gonna fall like a st— like a rock.” 

Merle starts hauling the rope, and Kravitz joins him. Once Taako is sure they have the rope he unwinds it from his hand, arm dropping like a stone as soon as it’s free of the rope. 

Dimly, he realizes he can’t actually move that shoulder anymore, but until they close the door behind Magnus, he has to make sure Levitate doesn’t fail. Taako leans back against the wall, ready to slide down and sit on the floor as soon as everyone’s good.

It takes a minute or so, but as soon as Magnus is inside, he collapses on the ground, letting go of the Light when the door closes. Lucretia picks it up as it rolls over to her, talking into her stone of farspeech as she does so. 

“We got him, Captain, let’s get the fuck out of here.” After an affirmation from Davenport (and the sounds of Barry and Lup heading down to meet them), Lucretia drops the stone in her pocket, crossing the distance to where Magnus is lying face up on the floor. “Are you okay?” 

“I’m good.” Magnus gives a tired thumbs up. “Just dizzy.” He squints, and when he puts his hand back down it’s like he’s not totally sure it’s attached to him. “Really dizzy, actually. I think it may have caught my leg.” Magnus puts his hand on his pants, and then freezes. He pulls away his palm and looks at it, and even before he turns it so that everyone else can see it, Taako knows. 

His palm is covered in blood. 

“Hm,” says Magnus. 

“Roll— roll your fucking pants leg up you moron!” snaps Taako. Magnus shakily pushes himself into a sitting position and starts to roll up his pants— they’re black, so it wasn’t super visible, but now that he’s looking for it, Taako can see the part over his right shin is soaked in blood. 

Lup and Barry come barreling through the door just as Magnus reveals the wound on his leg— shallow, but big, and Taako’s not an expert, but he doesn’t think it’s supposed to be bleeding that much. 

“That doesn’t look good,” remarks Magnus. 

It is pandamonium instantly. Lup and Barry demanding to know what’s going on, Merle and Lucretia asking Magnus various questions that don’t actually seem relevant to Taako, Kravitz trying to say something about the injury. Taako slides to the floor and tries to ignore the atmosphere developing in the room.

“The wound won’t clot on its own. It has to be bandaged tightly or cauterized and it has to happen now before he bleeds out,” says Kravitz. “They have venom, and it works as a blood thinner—”

“Okay, so do that!” 

“I’m a bard, not a healer! I only know what to do, not how to do it! Besides, I only know one healing spell!”

“Merle!” Taako speaks up, finally. Merle looks like he’s just been whacked on the head, and turns to face Taako with way more reproach than he should be considering his job is literally the healer. 

“What?”

“What do you mean what,” splutters Taako, “You’re the fuckin healer, so why aren’t— why aren’t you doing your fu— why aren’t you healing him—”

“It’s better if you don’t use up a spell until the wound can’t reopen— unless you can heal him back to full health it’ll start bleeding again—”

“Take off my shirt.”

“Nobody wants to see that Magnus.”

“I meant to use as a bandage.” Magnus looks affronted. “I wouldn’t even be shirtless, I’m wearing a binder.”

“You need it cauterized, right?” asks Lup. “Magnus, find something to hold onto.”

“Why what are you—” Lup lights up her hand, and Magnus grabs his own leg when he sees the flame. “I’m good Lup! I can bleed out, I’ll see you guys next year!”

“Move your hand before you actually do bleed out—”

“Do we have no bandages on the ship? We definitely have bandages on the ship,” says Barry. Lup ignores him. 

Kravitz has backed up slightly, but shouts into the din, “He could go into shock at any moment, you have to do—”

“Magnus! Let me cauterize your stupid cut!” yells Lup. 

“Fine!” 

Taako leans back and closes his eyes. 

Magnus knows a lot of curse words. Not as many as Taako, seeing as Taako has more languages under his belt, but he thinks one of the things Magnus says is in infernal. Nice. He’ll have to ask Magnus what it means when he’s not bleeding out.

Taako tunes out the rest of the crew and thinks about how tired he is— he doesn’t normally sleep but he might just for kicks tonight—

“Are you okay? That rope yanked your arm pretty hard.”

Kravitz voice makes him start. His ears momentarily press back against his head, but otherwise he manages to keep his cool as he opens his eyes. “I’m good.”

Kravitz stares at him in silences for a second, doubt written clearly on his face. “Take the jacket off.”

“Forward, I like that.” 

“I—” Kravitz stops and huffs, rubbing his temple. “You’re injured.” 

“If you want it off you’ll have to do it yo— you’ll have to do the honors. My shoulder is not moving of its own accord.” 

Kravitz’s brow furrows, and he starts gently trying to ease the jacket off of Taako— it slides off of his good arm easily enough, but Kravitz has to work the jacket sleeve off of Taako’s bad shoulder. It’s lucky Kravitz’s jacket is broader there. Kravitz manages to get it half way down Taako’s bad arm before he stops, looking from one shoulder to the other. 

“I think your shoulder’s dislocated,” says Kravitz, and Taako hums. 

“Explains the pop noise. Feel like I didn’t hear that the last time.”

“You’ve dislocated your shoulder before?”

“Yeah.” Taako doesn’t offer any more information, and despite the curiosity on Kravitz’s face, he doesn’t press. “Hey Lup, if you’re done bu— roasting Magnus’s leg, my fuckin shoulder is dis— dis— uh, popped out of its socket.”

Lup looks up from Magnus, and after checking to make sure Merle’s got him, comes over to sit down beside him. 

“I thought the rope sounded like a bad idea.”

“I will— I will punch you when I can move my arm again.”

Lup laughs. “Do you want to just wait for Merle?”

“No offense to Merle, but he couldn’t heal his way out of a paper bag and I would— can you just put the fuckin’ thing back?” 

“Uh, are you sure that’s safe?” interjects Kravitz, and Taako waves him off. 

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” 

Kravitz inspects their faces for a second, seems to realize they’re serious, and offers his hand, presumably so Taako has something to hold onto while Lup moves his shoulder back into place. Taako stares at it for a moment, weighing whether he wants to take it or not— on the one hand, he’s not a baby, but on the other, he can hold Kravitz’s hand. 

He takes it. 

Gift horse or whatever. 

Lup puts her hands on Taako’s arm. “I’m gonna pop your shoulder back in, okay?”

“Yeah just fuckin' do i—”

Lup doesn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. The constant pain in his shoulder upticks sharply and suddenly, and he lets out a curse and squeezes Kravitz’s hand so tightly he’s almost concerned he’s broken Kravitz’s fingers. 

Then it’s over, replaced by a dull ache. It’s definitely still swollen, but much more tolerable. Lup lets go of his arm and he moves it, wincing. 

“Here,” says Kravitz, and puts his free hand on Taako’s shoulder. “This should help.” As he speaks, Taako’s shoulder chills as if Kravitz has dumped ice water on it, taking down the pain to an almost unnoticeable level. 

Taako touches it gingerly after Kravitz moves his hand. “Thanks,” he says, and Kravitz smiles.

Across the room, Magnus is sitting up now. He looks a little sickly and kinda sweaty, but otherwise no worse for wear. He makes eye contact with Taako and gives an empathetic, if a little weak, thumbs up. 

Davenport’s voice crackles through Lup’s stone of farspeech, muffled by her jacket before she takes it out of her pocket. “Everyone okay?”

“No one’s dead and we have the Light,” says Lup. Magnus makes a rude gesture at her and points to his leg. She sticks out her tongue at him.

“It really concerns me when you respond like that because you know that’s not what I asked,” says Davenport. 

“Be sure to let HR know about that,” says Lup. Davenport groans. Lup laughs. “Everyone is… relatively fine. Taako and Magnus got injured but they’ll survive.”

“Good enough,” says Davenport, “Tell Kravitz we’re headed to drop him off.” 

“Sounds good,” says Kravitz, and Lup’s stone becomes unresponsive. The room’s atmosphere is still tired, but everyone starts chattering again quickly. 

Kravitz spends a weird amount of time looking at his hand, and Taako is about to ask him why when he says, “You know, it uh, it’s a bit late now but it occurs to me Mage Hand probably would have gotten the job done much faster, huh?”

The room gets silent for a solid ten seconds. Taako isn’t sure what curse word he’s going to say when he finally says something, but whatever it is, it’ll be a bad one. Whether it’s about the fact that no one suggested that earlier or about Kravitz bringing it up now, he hasn’t decided.

He doesn’t get the chance before Magnus says, “Yeah, but my idea was funner.”

“Burnsides, I’m gonna kick your ass into the next fucking plane,” says Lup.

It’s well into the night by the time they get back to Kravitz’s city. Half the crew has already retired for the night, leaving Davenport piloting, and Taako, Kravitz, and Lucretia eating the remainder of the chocolate chip cookies and talking in the cockpit to keep him company. Lucretia is almost asleep by the time they arrive too, jolted awake by the Starblaster landing. 

Davenport stretches his arms and yawns. “Lucretia,” he says, rubbing his eyes as he walks towards the door, “You should go to bed.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” says Lucretia, getting to her feet and heading out the door, spinning around at the last second and sleepily saying, “Thanks for your help, Kravitz.” 

“Oh, uhm, don’t mention it,” says Kravitz, but Lucretia has already retreated back to her room. 

Taako gets to his feet and Kravitz follows him to the Starblaster entrance. 

“Well,” says Taako, opening the door, “Goodnight.” He pauses, and then before Kravitz can respond, says, "Oh shit, uh, this is your— here hold on—" Taako slides Kravitz's jacket off and hands it back to him. 

"Oh— Yes, thank you. It's uhm, sort of cold, I probably need that."

"You're uh, you're lu—lucky I didn't try to steal it." It's partly a joke. Mostly a joke. Some element of that wasn't serious. 

"Uh, I'll take that as a compliment," says Kravitz. "Goodnight." He pauses and shifts his weight from foot to foot for a second before shaking off whatever had him hesitating and heading outside. Taako watches him for a second, and then steps forward before Kravitz can get too far away. 

“Kravitz,” says Taako, and Kravitz turns back around. “I know we’ve got the whole, uh, the whole, en— world being eaten thing sorta, uh, taken care of, but we’re still here for a few months. If you wanted— wanted to, uh, see if we can figure out any more about…” Taako waves his hand at the Starblaster and then at Kravitz. “You know. What’s happening.” 

“There’s a really good coffee place just east of the town square if you’re free the day after tomorrow. Does eleven work?” 

Taako smiles. “See you then.” And Kravitz smiles too, and then heads off down the street, making the first right and disappearing.

The coffee da— the coffee… whatever it is goes well. Taako almost wishes it didn’t, but Kravitz is funny and smart and surprisingly easy to talk to considering Taako makes a point to not connect to anyone besides his fellow crew members. 

They go again. It’s casual and they just talk and then next week Kravitz comes back to the Starblaster to hang out with everyone there (they play tag-team Monopoly, which Lup and Kravitz win. Taako and Lucretia come in second which isn’t fair since they had Fantasy Park Place and also Lup is not really a graceful winner), and then Kravitz takes him on a tour of the town even though they’ve been there for seven months and then it’s been a month and _what is Taako doing_?

Going on dates that are not called dates and flirting and being responded to and then backing out and most importantly not addressing any kind of elephant in the room? 

If Kravitz was just some nobody he met one cycle who was hot, he could do this. He can love ‘em and leave ‘em, if he wants. If the circumstances are right. 

Kravitz coming back— or not coming back— throws a wrench in his plans. Namely, that he can’t make plans if he doesn’t know anything about Kravitz. His whole interdimensional schtick is just as much a mystery as it was when they found him. This could be the last time they ever see him. 

Or it could be one of the first. 

Taako doesn’t do failure and he doesn’t do false hope. The only stable things he has in every universe are the crew, something that Kravitz is not a part of. So he doesn’t push anything. And Kravitz doesn’t push either.

“One month left, right?” asks Kravitz one day. Taako starts, glancing up at him. 

“About that, yeah,” he says finally, looking out the window of Kravitz’s shop instead of at him. It’s silent for a long moment, as though Kravitz hadn’t had any idea what he was going to say after Taako responded. 

“Sort of puts a damper in things, doesn’t it?”

Taako looks back at Kravitz, but Kravitz is focusing intently on his work. 

It’s better this way, Taako thinks, easier to move on to the next cycle in a month, easier for Kravitz to live the rest of his life, if they don’t—

If they don’t…

Just, if they don’t.

Kravitz must know that too.

“Sure does,” he agrees, and that’s that. 

The goodbye a month later is relatively unceremonious. It’s almost casual, despite the general panic of getting out before the Hunger can get them. Taako is the last back to the Starblaster, using an extra few minutes that he barely has to say goodbye to Kravitz. 

This world will make it through. They got the Light, after all. 

“Get somewhere safe,” says Taako, sincere for once in his life.

Kravitz stares for a second. “Taako, I… nevermi— I will.” His expression changes to a bittersweet smile. “Maybe I’ll see you next time around.”

“I’d like that,” says Taako, and Kravitz laughs, and for a second Taako feels like he should do or say something, but then the moment passes and he turns on his heels and makes a break for the Starblaster. 

He doesn’t look back. 

He doesn’t even look at the planet as they leave. 

And that’s the last they see of Kravitz, for awhile.

The 18th cycle is freezing. It took them a month to even notice people living on it, since over half of every city is underground to avoid the elements. The sun hangs low in the sky every day, barely dipping below the horizon for four or so hours before rising up again. 

The sky is cotton candy pink, when they can see it through the snow. A week of looking at the planet from the Starblaster at the beginning of the cycle and they eventually conclude that the Light isn’t out in the open (or if it is, they’re sort of fucked for finding it since it would have been buried so quickly in snow). 

The locals are nice enough. They come and go as they please, most of the time, and it’s been awhile since the seven have bought winter clothes, so they take this opportunity to stock up. 

The underground streets are bustling pretty much always; every shop entrance, house entrance, it’s all down here, and it’s magically lit and heated to be balmy compared to outside. It’s no summer heat, but it’s much better than the trek from the Starblaster to the town. 

Taako is loaded down with various pieces of snow gear for the crew (as well as a jacket for him that was probably too flimsy for this weather but was very nice and Taako is deffo gonna be wearing it in a warmer cycle) leaving one of the shops, and the doorway is just a little too narrow for both incoming and outgoing traffic, so it’s almost inevitable he bumps into someone. 

Being knocked to the ground is a little bit more inconvenient than he would have liked, though. 

“Oh shit— I’m so sorry,” says the voice of the culprit, and Taako freezes, hand halfway towards one of his bags. “Here,” he says, and grabs the bag Taako is reaching for before offering him a hand up. 

Taako takes it. He knows before they come face to face whose hand it is.

“Sorry again,” says Kravitz, once Taako is on his feet. “I thought I’d stepped far enough to the side, but— do you have everything?” He looks at Taako, and Taako searches his face, but for the third time, nothing about Kravitz’s expression gives away that he’s ever seen Taako before. 

“Kravitz,” says Taako, and then mentally kicks himself— how the fuck did he make one single word sound so eager and excited? Taako doesn’t do eager, and he certainly doesn’t give indications he missed people. 

Fuck, has he _missed_ Kravitz?

“Uh— yes?” Kravitz squints. “Sorry, I don’t… this is sort of rude to ask I guess, but have we met before?”

“Uh, sort of,” says Taako. Kravitz raises his eyebrows, and Taako quickly checks to make sure he’s got everything. “Listen, I’m, uh, I’m busy right now, but I’ll meet you here tomorrow if you— if your uh, memory thing works the same as last time, okay?”

“What?” says Kravitz. 

“Same time, same place,” says Taako. 

“...What?” Kravitz repeats.

“Listen, Krav, trust me,” says Taako. 

“I don’t even— wait—” 

The streets are very busy. It’s not that hard to lose Kravitz and head back towards the Starblaster; Kravitz doesn’t chase him down. Taako sort of wishes he had shades to put on, for the drama of it all. Also because the sun is very bright on the snow outside, despite the soft tone of the sky. He’ll have to buy a pair when he meet Kravitz tomorrow. 

Taako pushes back through the crowd and tries not to get his hopes about Kravitz— about him remembering, about whether this means it’s a pattern, about… just about all of it. 

Whatever. Kravitz can be their helping hand, their man on the ground. That’s probably why he hopes Kravitz remembers again, why he was so relieved to see him. It is better for Taako if he tells himself that’s why. 

Or at least, it’s probably better. 

It’s hard to tell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know its been a long time but also this is over 10k words and also i died trying to pass statistics please take pity on me i swear on my life ch3 will not take a month. it will be longer than a week tho im aiming for two weeks bc summer is almost here and i can do that. it will probably be less than 10k words. i don't even know where this 10k came from there was always just more stuff to write. 
> 
> i haven't responded to them (yet im gonna though) but thank you all so much for your comments <3 <3 (& kudos & bookmarks & the other functions of this site i don't know how to use) it really means a lot!!!!!
> 
> you can find me at tumblr @tieflinggay where i lb my writing process with posts like "'temple' doesn't look like a real word"


	3. Once In A Lifetime

Kravitz wakes up with a headache. 

For several moments, that’s the only thing on his mind. It feels like he got clubbed on the back of the head while he slept, although by the time he stumbles out of bed to the kitchen to get himself a glass of water, it’s all but gone, leaving only a dull ache behind. 

He absently rubs the side of his head as he finishes off his water, trying to recall if he’d done anything to cause that. He could’ve hit his head on the headboard maybe? But he doubted that would have gone away so quickly. And he’d had an early night, so it wasn’t a short lived hangover. He hadn’t even done anything new; visited River, did some errands, ran into Taako outside of—

The glass he’s holding slips from his hands and hits the floor, cracking into several large pieces as it does so. 

“Shit,” mutters Kravitz, leaning over and scooping up the larger pieces of glass and dumping them in the garbage, before carefully stepping out of the kitchen to grab the broom. 

_Taako._

The memories of Taako, of the rest of the IPRE crew, of his previous lives and planets— they’re just there now. Fuzzy and vague outside of the months the crew stayed, but otherwise mundane. Like the memory of what he did last week, of what his favourite food is. Aside from the headache (which has completely disappeared now), it feels almost trivial that he remembers. Of course he remembers; why wouldn’t he remember?

Except he didn’t, yesterday. Or any other time before that.

God, what time had he even run into Taako yesterday? It wasn’t like he’d kept track, because he hadn’t expected to actually _want_ to meet up with this stranger who said some cryptic bullshit and ditched. It couldn’t have been too late, because he’d come home for lunch. Kravitz finishes sweeping the kitchen and leans the broom against the wall instead of putting it away. 

Noonish? One? Kravitz can remember several past lives but can’t remember when he had lunch yesterday.

Couldn’t Taako have asked to meet somewhere better than just outside one of the shops? Probably not. He wasn’t even sure Taako knew where anything was; they could’ve just landed yesterday for all Kravitz knows. They’re probably still looking for the Light of Creation—

“Shit,” says Kravitz, out loud. 

He knows where it is. 

Or at least, he knows where it is provided Grace hasn’t sold it yet. 

He only just got back from visiting her a couple days ago and Grace’s turnaround time really isn’t that quick so he’s probably fine, but he scrambles to his landline anyway; the faster Grace knows she shouldn’t sell it to anyone else, the more chance that they won’t have to go on a wild goose chase to find the damn thing again. 

Kravitz says Grace’s name and line number into the mouthpiece and waits for the line to light up; it takes a couple moments (busy, for a morning, but Kravitz assumes he’s just accidentally timed it to run with the train), but the cord connecting the mouthpiece to the wall starts glowing blue. 

“Hey Grace, it’s Kravitz, uh— I know I was just over but I’ll probably be headed back tonight or tomorrow. I can explain when I get there, but in the meantime it’s important that you don’t get rid of that light thing you found. I think I know who it belongs to and it’s vital that they get it back. You don’t have to leave me a response message, I can talk to you in person as soon as possible. Just trust me on this. I’ll talk to you soon— clear skies.” 

He cuts the message and drops the mouthpiece; Grace won’t check her messages until tonight, so he can only hope she holds onto it until then. 

She probably will; she’s a hoarder by nature, but that doesn’t stop him from being nervous about it. The stakes just got a lot higher, after all. Briefly, he considers staying home for another couple hours, but knows he’d be too antsy to do anything productive. 

Instead, he heads to his room to get dressed for the day; there’s a café by the shop he ran into Taako at where he can camp out for a few hours and wait. He grabs the shirt and pants closest to the front of his closet (well, second closest shirt, because the first closest shirt isn’t a very nice shade of green and while he’s not going out of his way to look good, he also has standards) and gets changed quickly, heading out into the hallway to grab a coat off the rack at the door.

Kravitz hesitates for a second and then forgoes his regular jacket for a slightly brighter one. Dark red. Sort of fitting for the IPRE. And it’s nicer looking anyway. Kravitz slips on his shoes and heads to the hallway, already a few steps down the stairs before the door closes. 

As he passes through the still empty building common room on the bottom floor (it’s early enough that most people haven’t bothered to get up, let alone come downstairs to interact with other people), the front door opens, sending a mild draft inside. David, Kravitz’s neighbour from two rooms over who keeps accidentally changing the colour of the floorboards in the hall, waves at Kravitz as he shuffles inside.

“Early lesson?” asks Kravitz, and David yawns. 

“Yeah,” says David, and then looks over at Kravitz, raising his eyebrows. “Special occasion?”

“Uh, no?”

“Are you sure? You only wear that red jacket when you’re going to a party or a date.”

Kravitz looks down at his jacket and self-consciously shifts his weight; it’s nice, to be sure, but he hadn’t thought his behaviour was that predictable. David snorts at this, and Kravitz looks up and glares at him.

“Enjoy your date.”

“It’s not a date.”

“I see. Enjoy your not-date, and don’t worry, I’m sure he likes you.” David claps him on the shoulder as he passes him, heading towards the stairwell.

“I’m not— I’m not trying to impress him— David—” Kravitz spins around, pursuing the need to defend himself. From what, he’s not entirely sure. David gives him a thumbs up and then disappears around the spiral of the staircase. Kravitz lets out an annoyed huff and puts his scarf on before heading outside. 

David’s like— well, Kravitz doesn’t actually know David’s age but it’s younger than his for sure (especially now), so what does he know?

He gets to the café with hours to spare, orders a coffee in a to-go cup, just in case, and sits at a table facing the window, watching people go by. 

And he waits. And waits, and waits, and spends most of his energy trying to to think about anything. 

Kravitz has three coffees to calm his nerves. By the third coffee, the barista is giving him a sympathetic smile that barely covers her concern. 

“One of those days, huh,” she says, and Kravitz nods. 

“Something like that,” he says, filling up the cup she’d handed him at the dispenser. Even though, all things considered, today is a day the least like any other day before it. 

“Good luck,” she says, and Kravitz nods, before sitting back down at his table and staring out the window. 

He’s halfway through his cup of coffee when he spots who he’s looking for outside. 

Now that he remembers Taako, Kravitz can really see that he doesn’t belong on this plane. Details that are easy to gloss over jump out at him; he’s a little too sharp, his movements track in a way the eye isn’t used to. He’s definitely an elf, but an elf an inch to the left. 

No one else bats an eye at him. Then again, no one is looking at Taako the way Kravitz is.

Kravitz gets to his feet, taking his still half full coffee cup and racing out the door, dodging the people in the streets and then slowing down to a slightly more casual-looking walk as he approaches. 

“You know, I don’t totally understand why you didn’t just ask to meet somewhere less in the way—”

Taako spins around as Kravitz talks, and Kravitz cuts himself off, attempt at nonchalant smile traded for one that makes his cheeks hurt. For a split second, Taako looks genuinely excited to see him, and then his expression drops down to mild amusement. “How come you didn’t, uh, didn’t buy me a coffee?”

“Is that how you normally greet your friends? No nice to see you, no it’s been so long, no I missed you—” the _I missed you_ part slips out unbidden, but if Taako notices the change in tone, he doesn’t comment. 

“I’d mi— I’d only miss you if you hadn’t uh, almost stood me up.”

“You were out here for maybe ten seconds.” Kravitz points to the nearby café. “I was waiting over there.” 

“Ten seconds too long,” retorts Taako, but Kravitz swears he sees Taako’s grin get a little bigger. Kravitz is silent looking at him for admittedly, longer than is normal, but before Taako can say anything, Kravitz clears his throat and moves the conversation forward. 

“I know where the Light is.”

Taako’s expression drops— takes on an almost sour note Kravitz hadn’t been expecting. “What?”

“I know where the Light is,” Kravitz repeats, “Or rather I know who has it— one of my— a family friend, she’s sort of a collector and traded someone for it—who knows where he found it before that, but she’s a couple towns over and I dropped her a line this morning to let her know not to sell it. The uh, train there is several hours but they leave once every half hour so—”

“Krav.” Taako cuts him off, amused expression back, although the sourness remains on the edges. “Are you, uh, forget— forgetting something?”

Kravitz blinks, which prompts Taako’s smile to grow. “What?”

“We have a spaceship. Like, I don’t mean to rain on— rain on your parade but that’ll probab— probably be faster.”

“Oh. Right. Yes, of course. So we should head back to the Starblaster…?” Kravitz changes his statement to a question when Taako puts up his hand in a sort of ‘stop’ motion. 

“Hold on, I’m— I wanna buy some shades.” 

“Really?” Kravitz raises his eyebrows. 

“Listen,” says Taako. “Last cycle was a bit— uh, a bit of a downer. Ended on a low— low note. So can an elf just have a minute? Just take a breather for once in his life?” Taako’s smile hasn’t left his face, but there’s a note of strain in his voice, and Kravitz’s mild contempt dissolves. No wonder he hadn’t been excited for Kravitz to jump to business so quickly. 

“Sure. Sunglasses shopping sounds fine.” 

Taako’s grin gets a little more genuine and his ears perk up, just briefly. “‘Course it does.” He heads towards the store entrance, Kravitz falling into step beside him once they get inside. “We still got like, uh—” Taako pauses to count as they stop in front of glasses rack. “Nine-ish months left here? I can stop and b— and pick up some shades before worrying about end of the world shit.”

Kravitz knows the IPRE’s time here is limited. Nothing, really, has changed since last time, but it’s still jarring to have Taako voice it out loud. Confirmation of an ending before there’s even a chance for a beginning. The knowledge tastes bitter— in other circumstances, Kravitz would have liked to… —he would've...

Well. Not that it mattered with a finite time limit like that. Even if he was guaranteed another lifetime afterwards, which, since they still don't know the cause of Kravitz reappearing, he isn't.

Kravitz pushes that out of his mind and tries to tune back into Taako’s chatter about the last couple years. It’s just conversational; Taako is distinctly avoiding talking about how the years have concluded since they’ve seen each other last. 

“...No offense,” Taako is saying, “but that place was fuckin’ eons ahead of anywhere else. Maybe like, one eon ahead of this place—” Taako gestures around the shop, “—since at least you, uh, this place has like, civilization or whatever. Although it’s not, uh— not exactly a technological masterpiece, you know what I’m saying—”

“If you were anyone else, that would probably come across incredibly rude.”

Taako laughs. “But I’m not anyone else, am I?”

“No,” Kravitz agrees, probably too fondly, “You really aren’t.” Curiosity gets the better of him as he finishes off the last of his coffee and tosses the cup into the bin back by the entrance (it bounces off the rim, but does make it in). “If you don’t mind me asking, what happened last cycle to make sunglasses a priority?”

“Okay, well— first of all, sunglasses are never— they’re always a priority. Speaking of— what d’you think of these ones?” Taako holds up a pair of aviators. 

“The frames look kind of small for your face.”

“Good eye.” Taako puts them back. “Second, uh— we had uh, issues finding the Light, so we— we made a tough choice. Almost destroyed the uh— what remained of a pretty big civilization, and some robots— didn’t though. ‘Nother day at the office for Taako.” His tone is cheerful, but Kravitz can see careful eyes watching him in the mirror above the sunglasses rack. 

“Sounds rough,” says Kravitz, “Maybe try that green pair?”

Taako visibly relaxes, and steps up to Kravitz’s change in conversation instantly. “I wouldn’t— you couldn’t, uh, couldn’t pay me to wear those.”

“Well, there’s no accounting for taste.”

Taako laughs and Kravitz cracks a smile, and the two of them lapse into comfortable silence for a moment.

“How do these look?” Taako selects a pair of blue tinted sunglasses with comically large circular lenses and spins around from the sunglasses rack. 

“Tacky,” says Kravitz, “But you make them work surprisingly well.” 

“Fuck yeah I do.” Taako grabs a second pair, an even worse offender with pink star shaped lenses, and heads towards the shopkeeper. Kravitz follows behind him, perusing the knick-knacks set out on the counter to entice last second buyers.

“Leslie, you know you can’t say this actually makes people younger when it doesn’t,” he says, scanning the label of one of the potion bottles.

“I don’t say. It says it’s illusory in the fine print,” says Leslie breezily, before looking at the two pairs on sunglasses in Taako’s hand. “Those are three copper pieces each.” 

Taako starts digging through his pockets, looking up when Kravitz leans past him and places a silver piece on the counter. 

“You know— uh, I have money—”

“I certainly hope so, considering you were here yesterday and you had bags of stuff. You didn’t uh, you didn’t steal those, right?”

“Would’ve been a bit, uh, a bit more subtle if I had,” says Taako, and leans back just slightly. Kravitz slides the silver piece toward Leslie, who smiles at him and hands him his change. Taako doesn’t say thank you, but Kravitz wasn’t really expecting him to.

“Clear skies,” says Leslie as they head towards the door. 

“Clear skies,” echoes Kravitz over his shoulder, and then pushes the door open, holding it open with one hand so Taako can come through behind him.

“Starblaster’s this way,” says Taako, and starts leading Kravitz through the crowd. Taako chatters the whole way to the town’s entrance, mostly about what he’s been up to, although he occasionally asks Kravitz question that Kravitz is happy to answer, when he can. 

“So how does the, uh—” Taako gestures for a moment somewhere in front of them as he searches for the word. “—the gate, I guess? At the entrance to the town, how does that work?”

“Uh, I’m not… I don’t actually know. I mean, I know it’s magic and that it keeps the snow out the same way the skylights do—” Kravitz points above them, to the squares of glowing blue, melting the snow above them in order to let what little sunlight they can filter into the city, “—but I don’t actually know any more than that. My knowledge of arcana is… not great. This time.”

“So— okay, what do you, uh— what do you do, this time?” 

“Oh I— I teach music.”

“Musician,” Taako hums, “Kinda like last time, huh.” Kravitz shrugs. 

“Actually, that one seems the least weird. In terms of things that stayed the same between lifetimes. I don’t like music because of any particular event in my past, so there’s no… requirement for something to happen early in life to make me like it that has to keep happening over and over again.”

“So why do you like it?”

Kravitz hesitates. “Just think it’s beautiful, mostly. Music tells a story I’m interested in listening to. Interested in telling myself. There’s an element of… connection, is I guess how I’d phrase it? Uh, connection with others in music that I’ve always liked. I guess you can connect to others through anything, but music has always been easy for me. Makes sense that I’d always seek it out as an occupation or a hobby.”

Taako nods. “Sorta an ‘in sync’ type vibe, I getcha— I can uh, when me and Lup cook I can pretty much read her mind. ‘Course, we’re twins, so uh, I can just read her mind whenever—”

“Well,” starts Kravitz, “I just don’t think that’s true—”

“No I definitely can— Can you, uh, is that not a normal sibling thing here? Because we can definitely—”

“You are really not as good a liar as you think you are. You don’t need to double down on this.”

Kravitz doesn’t bother to hide his eye roll as Taako continues to insist, ineffectually, that he and Lup have some form of twin telepathy. 

“Just uh, just wait until we— until we’re back, then I’ll prove—”

“Using the Message cantrip doesn’t count, Taako.” Kravitz stifles a laugh as Taako gives him an exaggerated scowl. “Besides, if you can already talk to her telepathically, you’re not really connecting through cooking, are you?”

Taako huffs, rolling his eyes as if Kravitz is the idiot here. Kravitz’s laugh doesn’t stay stifled at that. “I’m just saying— your uh, connection thing, it’s super fucking corny, but I get it.”

“Is that why you like cooking?”

“Nope. That’s a bonus.” Taako brings them to a halt as they reach the city borders, and the entrance topside. There’s much fewer people around here; not a lot of coming and going outside, even among travellers. It’s much easier to take the train to go from city to city. 

“So why do you do it?”

It’s Taako’s turn to hesitate. “Gotta have, uh— have control over something,” he says, voice carefully casual. He inspects his nails as Kravitz furrows his brows. “If— when things go to— to shit, I can still bake a mean angel food cake, y’know? Anyway,” Taako fumbles in his pocket and brings out his stone of farspeech. “Hey, Lup.” The stone makes a garbled static noise, and Taako curses under his breath. “They’ve been so— so shit lately—”

“It’s the weather,” interjects Kravitz. “The less material components in magic the more the weather interferes with it. Everything in the city is tied to a network of landlines because of it. They’ll probably be like that all year, unfortunately.”

“Damn. Well, we’ll, uh— we’ll figure that out later. The Starblaster is supposed to be just out— just outside city limits, so we should be good to go, but it’s uh, it’s fucking cold out there and I don’t wanna—”

The stone crackles again, and Lup’s voice, faint but audible, rings through it. “Taako? You on —ckckckck— here?”

“Just at the door. You guys didn’t— didn’t move, right?”

“Still like two —ck—utes away. We’ll light it up so you can —ckckc— ship”

“Cool, see you in a few.” Taako drops the stone back in his pocket and gestures to the door. “Age before beauty.” 

“You’re probably older than me,” says Kravitz, but walks through the barrier anyway. Once on the other side, he shivers, pulling his jacket tighter around him and turning around just long enough to see Taako put on his new shades, walk through the light-blue translucent entranceway, and do the same.

“Me being an elf doesn’t— doesn’t cancel out the several lifetimes you have under your belt now, my man.” 

“That’s a technicality, but I’ll allow it.” Kravitz grins and pulls his scarf up to cover his mouth and nose while Taako laughs. Technicalities are a Kravitz specialty; that’s how he manages to obey most rules, after all. Taako looks past Kravitz and points. When Kravitz turns, he spots what Taako does; a bright red-orange glow in the middle distance. 

The walk is short, but the wind is too strong to hear one another easily, even though they have to stay shoulder to shoulder to avoid losing each other in the storm. The Starblaster seems to emerge suddenly, not visible until they’re almost on top of it. Seconds later, Lup comes into view, thrown into sharp relief by the ball of the fire hovering between her open palms. She spots them and grins, extinguishing her spell as they approach. 

“Kravitz!” she yells, barely audible over the wind. Kravitz smiles back and offers a wave, silent until all three of them are inside. 

“Hey, Lup,” says Kravitz, and Lup grins at him before heading down the hallway in front of them.

“Guess what the cat dragged in!” 

“Took you long enough.” Magnus is loud enough to be heard from the hallway, although his grin is sincere when Kravitz and Taako finally get in the room. They get waves and quiet ‘hello’s from the rest of the crew, and Kravitz can’t keep the smile off his face.

The interior of the Starblaster is exactly like Kravitz remembers it, and walking into it feels like coming home after a long day. He hasn’t missed it— hasn’t had the opportunity to— but it still feels like coming back to something. A childhood friend. An old love rekindled. 

Taako huffs at Magnus in annoyance. “We were— we did uh, important, life-changing, mission work—”

“We picked up some sunglasses,” interjects Kravitz, and laughs when Taako elbows him.

“Got another lead on the Light?” asks Barry. 

“I know you’re joking but I do, actually. I know the person who has it.” This provokes a couple raised eyebrows, so Kravitz hurries through his explanation. “Her name’s Grace. She’s a couple towns over. She’s a family friend and she is uh, a collector of rare items. And a merchant of rare items. Anyway I called her this morning to let her know we need the Light, so we—”

“Sounds like an open and shut ca— why are you making that face.”

“Well, she’s probably not going to hand it over for free.”

“Didn’t you say you were friends?” pipes up Lucretia, and Kravitz sighs. 

“Mhm. Trust me, we still aren’t getting it for free.”

“Okay,” starts Magnus, “This still sounds way better than last time, and we have a ton of cool shit laying around.” There’s a couple nods in agreement, and Kravitz shrugs. “I mean, I’m sure we can find something,” he continues. 

“Can you direct us to the town? We’re sort of flying in the dark because of the climate.” When Kravitz turns, Davenport’s expression is cautious, like he’s still not sure what to make of Kravitz. Honestly, Kravitz isn’t even sure what to make of Kravitz, so he sees where Davenport is coming from. 

“Of course. Sort of. I can do general directions?”

“You know what, close enough.” Davenport gives a real (if long-suffering) smile, and gets to his feet. “Well, the Starblaster won’t fly itself.”

“I mean— it will though,” says Lup, “You built a pretty advanced autopilot system—”

Davenport gives a theatrical sigh, and everyone else laughs, and Kravitz couldn’t feel more welcome than this.

Retrieving the Light is relatively simple. _Relatively_ being the key word, because they aren’t putting their lives on the line to get it back this time, although that doesn’t make Grace less insufferable to do business with. Kravitz brings Merle and Taako with him, and tells Grace on no uncertain terms will she be able to keep that Light without jeopardizing her safety and that of their whole world, and she laughs, comments about how dramatic Kravitz always is, and then asks what they’re willing to trade for it. 

“What about the friends and family discount?” asks Merle. 

“Don’t have one,” says Grace.

“Well, that’s a little rude, don’cha think?”

“I don’t.”

“Tough sell,” says Taako, and then lets out a slow breath. “How valuable is this supposed to be?”

Grace looks at Kravitz like he’s supposed to be responsible for the dumb questions these two are asking, even though he’s at most only sixty percent responsible. 

“Ideally equal value,” says Kravitz, before Grace says anything, “Either something powerful or unique or personal. Grace please, we need it—” 

“Everyone needs something—”

“Oh my god. Okay. Fine. Does anyone have anything?” 

There’s a couple of moments of silence, and then Taako produces the star shaped sunglasses Kravitz just bought him and clears his throat, ignoring Kravitz’s muttered ‘oh my god’. “These… are very special to me. I got— They were a gift from an ex-lover and it while pains me to—”

“Yeah, well— Those are maybe three copper each,” says Grace. “And they sell them by Kravitz’s house. I live here, and this is my job, I know what’s common or not.”

“Yeah, okay,” says Taako, putting the shades back in his pocket. “That’s my bad, I— wasn’t a good deception roll, I’ll give y— that one’s on Taako.” He rummages around in the pockets of his robes for another couple seconds and then pulls out some kind of metal structure. “How about this part from an alien robot?”

This piques Grace’s interest, and she takes it from Taako’s outstretched palm. “What does it do?”

“Oh, it’s not enough that it’s from an alien robot, huh? Has to do something too? The Light doesn’t do anything by itself either, y’know.” Taako huffs in annoyance, and Grace stifles a smile before glancing up at Kravitz. 

“Okay,” she says after a moment, slipping the metal in her own pocket. “Wait here.” She disappears into the back room and Kravitz breathes a sigh of relief.

“I li— I had a, uh, had a soft spot that piece of alien robot,” says Taako, and Kravitz laughs. 

“From an ex-lover, hmm?” 

Taako gives a wide grin. “Gotta have a selling point somehow, my man.” 

Taako’s ability to play off what Kravitz would otherwise assume is sincere flirting as a joke is unparalleled. Before Kravitz can respond, Grace comes back out, holding the Light in her hands. Kravitz reaches for it, and for a split second, Grace doesn’t let go, and when Kravitz looks up at her, her gaze is fixed on the Light. 

Then it’s over, and she hands it off to him. 

“Visit soon,” she says. Kravitz sticks out his tongue at her, and she laughs. “Clear skies.”

“Clear skies.” Kravitz will give her that, at least. He’d have to be much more annoyed to wish bad weather on someone. 

“That went better than I expected.” says Kravitz, once they’re outside and head back to the ship.

“And you’re fr— you— you have get better friends, my dude.”

“Well, don’t sell yourself short.” 

This gets a laugh from Merle, and Taako does a bad job of hiding his smile.

Now that Kravitz is holding the Light he gets it. The longer he holds it the farther the feeling _wanting it_ burrows into his chest. No wonder Grace held onto it. 

It’s not bad, not good, just alien; a feeling that doesn’t originate from Kravitz. Despite the fact that the craving seems rather harmless, something about it gets under his skin.

“Take this,” he says, and hands it to Merle. Merle accepts it without complaint, but Taako raises his eyebrows. “Don’t like that I want to hold it.” 

“You are— that’s very weird, Krav.”

“You’re an alien so I think you can give me a free pass.”

“Tec— That’s a technicality, but I’ll allow it.”

“Don’t mock me.” 

Beside them, Merle sighs deeply. Taako steps on his foot. 

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” says Taako, in a voice that indicates he could not be less sorry, “Honest mistake.”

They’re back outside before Merle can get another complaint in, and by the time they arrive at the Starblaster, whatever silent argument Taako and Merle were having comes to a close.

“Mission success!” says Taako, and Merle holds up the Light as though he’s expecting cheers. None come, but the collective relief of the crew is almost audible. “Although I had to give u— uh, trade Magnus’s cool robot piece to do it.”

“Hey!” says Magnus, at the same time Kravitz says, “I thought that was yours.” Taako shrugs in response to both of these responses and ignore Magnus’s increasingly irritated questions about it. 

“Gonna stick around again this year?” asks Lup, pulling Kravitz’s attention from the escalating argument (well, escalating on Magnus’s side; Taako has picked up a magazine). 

“If you’ll have me.” 

“No, I asked so I could refuse you if you said yes.” Lup laughs. “Welcome back.” 

The following few months are a familiar routine. Kravitz goes about his daily life with visits to the Starblaster and visits from the crew— for awhile the weather even seems to bend in their favour. It’s been as horrible as normal, of course, but not enough to actually impede travel. Of course, once he thinks that, it’s only a matter of time before the universe tries to prove him wrong.

They get snowed in all at once. The morning was relatively clear; the Starblaster was visible from the town entrance. Kravitz had made the trek out to the ship to help Lucretia go through some of the more detailed texts she was studying, and Magnus, Barry, and Merle made the trek in to “do research” (although Kravitz was 99% sure they’re doing some kind of goofing off, although none of them would tell him what, exactly). 

The snowstorm rolls in, dumps several tonnes of snow on them, and then moves out. It looks like it should only last overnight at the very worst case, so Kravitz tells them all not to worry and says that as long as Magnus, Barry, and Merle don’t mind potentially crashing at Kravitz’s, there’s not a problem. 

They get all the across through a more patchy than normal stone of farspeech conversation with Magnus where Kravitz has to tell him six times where to find the spare key, before finally just telling him to ask David (he has to explain David is his neighbour twice). They’re about to hang up when Kravitz suddenly remembers something mildly important. 

“Magnus, can you be at mine at around six tonight? My parents are coming over to visit and I just need someone there to tell them I got snowed in at a friend’s house.” He debates telling them to just make a call, but trying to instruct Magnus on how to use the landline with this connection is a nightmarish thought, so he doesn’t bother. 

“Sorry, when?”

“Six.”

“Six, gotcha wi—ckckc— on me.” Half of Magnus’s sentence is unintelligible, but it seems to be affirmative, so Kravitz leans back in his chair. 

“Thanks, Magnus.”

“No problem. Over a—ckc—ut.” The stone goes dead, and Kravitz drops it on the table before looking up at Taako, who’s squinting at him like he’s a puzzle piece from the wrong box.

“What?”

“I didn’t know you had those.”

“...Parents?” Kravitz raises his eyebrows. 

“Okay, well— it sounds uh, sounds stupid when you say it like that.” Taako rolls his eyes, like Kravitz is the one saying something dumb here. “It’s just…” he trails off, and then shrugs. “Whatever, doesn’t matter.”

“No, what?”

“Well, the rest of the crew doesn’t— we can’t exactly have family visits. I mean, it’s uh— it’s already not t— it’s different for me and Lup, ‘cause she’s already here and we, uh, we aren’t visiting anyone else, but we don’t— Magnus doesn’t talk about his parents or whatever, you know?”

“Just sort of throws you off.” Kravitz doesn’t comment on the rest of the crew part of that sentence, but the implication that Kravitz belongs on this ship on some level starts making up for Taako somehow assuming he doesn’t have any parents. 

“Exactly.” Taako tilts his head and squints. “Do you ha— are your parents the same every cycle?”

Kravitz pauses, and tries to remember. 

He doesn’t like what he remembers.

“I… I don’t think so. I think they’re different people every time.” 

“You don’t think so?”

“Well, the memories aren’t crystal clear and I’m not constantly thinking about my parents from last time when I have parents from this time, because why would I assume they’re different this time—” Kravitz cuts himself off and takes a breath. “It doesn’t matter.” He sounds unsure, even to himself. “I don’t— My parents this lifetime are this version of myself’s parents, so they’re— so it doesn’t matter that they weren’t my parents last time.” That they didn’t exist last time. That thinking about it now, he’s had entirely different family structures before, each just as much his family as the last. 

Each where he’s the only constant. Or at least, it feels like he’s a constant— he remembers being _that_ Kravitz and knows being _this_ Kravitz and despite the changes between them there’s something there that’s just him. There has to be. 

Right?

(Was he still himself before he remembered all those previous selves? What makes him Kravitz other than the fact that he thinks he is?)

“Hey,” says Taako, and Kravitz’s gaze snaps up from the table. “Are you— you good?”

“I…” Kravitz trails off. “I’m not sure.” Another pause. Taako’s expression is carefully blank, but softer than it usually is. “It’s just… a lot to process, sometimes,” continues Kravitz. “It’s not fun, not remembering important parts of your life. Lives.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t— wouldn’t think it would be,” says Taako, and Kravitz knows it’s supposed to be a joke so he tries for a smile, although he’s not sure he manages it.

Abruptly, Taako gets to his feet and starts bustling around the kitchen. 

“What are you doing?”

“My fuckin’ job,” says Taako, going through the fridge. “I mean, if you don’t wanna— if you wanna starve, that’s fine with me, less food to waste, but— Can you cook?”

“Loosely speaking. I’m not about to become a gourmet chef but I can eat what I cook.”

“Better than most of the crew. Here, come— come over here, I need a hand.” Taako starts pulling things out of the fridge and putting them on the counter before pausing and looking back at Kravitz, who hasn’t moved. “I mean, you can just sit there moping all afternoon, but it sorta— maybe seems like you could use a breather. Now help me make this pot roast.” 

_Gotta have control over something._

Kravitz can get behind that, so he gets to his feet and heads over. As soon as Taako spots him, he starts giving instructions. 

“Okay, pot roast is simple enough. It’s one of those ‘throw everything in and wait’ kinda dishes so we should— even the fact that you’re not a cook can’t fuck it up, I hope.”

“Thanks?”

“You’re welcome. Once Merle fucked up while heating pre-made spaghetti sauce, so n— at this point, my tr— I’m not super sure of anything anymore.” Taako flashes a smile when Kravitz laughs before going back to his instructions. “Can you grab that— the thing, the— uh, top shelf, behind the flour—” He vaguely gestures at one of the cabinets, and Kravitz reaches up, putting the bag of flour and a bag of rice on the counter and waiting for Taako to find the word he’s looking for. “—olive oil! Big bottle, back corner—” Kravitz finds it and slides it across the counter towards Taako, starting to put everything back before Taako tells him to leave it until later and assigns him to vegetable chopping. 

A few minutes of this and Kravitz can see the appeal. Even for a simple meal like this, Taako is whirling around the kitchen, partly giving instructions to Kravitz and partly stream of consciousness relaying what he’s doing in a way that implies he only sometimes remembers Kravitz is there. It’s nice. Peaceful, even, and it does take Kravitz’s mind off of things, if only because he’s happy to listen to Taako chatter and go on tangents about his cooking. 

Prep takes about fifteen minutes with the both of them working, and then Taako is setting the timer. “Okay, so while that’s cooking— it’ll be a few hours, so we don’t need to— we won’t worry about it until the timer goes off.” Taako wipes his hands on his apron absently, moving some of the bowls to the sink. “Can you grab those— the plates over there, fuckin’ nobody ever cleans their own goddamn dishes—”

As Kravitz reaches over to the plates, his elbow catches the flour bag that’s been sitting on the counter since he moved it there; the split second before it falls seems to last several minutes, but it’s half open and the movement sends it tipping over the edge, leaving Kravitz scrambling to catch it, plates forgotten.

At the very least, it doesn’t hit the ground, but that doesn't stop it from turning over in midair.

Kravitz catches the flour bag and puts it back upright on the counter, but too little too late; the bottom half of his shirt and his pants (and the floor around him) is absolutely covered in flour.

There’s ten seconds of dead silence, and Taako doesn’t look away from Kravitz, and Kravitz doesn’t look away from his now flour-covered clothes.

“You have a little— a little something there,” says Taako. Kravitz, jolted out of his flour induced shock, looks slowly up at Taako; his expression is carefully blank, but his ears perk up in a way that tells Kravitz it’s about to crack.

The sarcasm Kravitz responds with is more impulse than anything else. “Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed.”

Taako can’t hold it in anymore; he laughs until he nearly doubles over. Kravitz crosses his arms, trying to come across as annoyed, but when Taako finally looks back up at him, he just starts laughing again. 

Taako is so busy laughing that he misses Kravitz drag his hands down his shirt to pick up flour, only catching on when Kravitz wipes his now flour-covered hands down Taako’s sleeve. 

“Hey!”

“You have something on your sleeve,” he says, unable to help the smug note in his voice. Taako grins again, and lunges forward. Kravitz lunges forward too, trying to stop him before he reaches the flour bag. In the chaos, it tips over onto the counter, sending flour both spilling over the counter and up in the air. The cloud mostly gets Taako, and for a couple seconds, he stands there in silence, mouth slightly open in shock as the flour settles. Kravitz laughs as Taako brushing off his apron just causes more, if slightly smaller, clouds of flour. 

Taako furrows his brows and then grins again, and before Kravitz has time to stop him, he plunges both hands into the flour on the counter, gathering just enough to throw at Kravitz and get the top of his shirt as well. 

Kravitz yelps before going for the flour pile too, but instead of throwing it, just drags his hand down the side of Taako’s face. Taako makes a face and Kravitz laughs again, but before Kravitz can take his hand away to grab more flour, Taako grabs his wrist. 

And then they stop. Tension drops on the two of them, thick as the snow outside. They stand like that— Kravitz’s hand on Taako’s cheek, Taako’s hand on his wrist, probably a bit closer than called for by a food fight— in silence for a moment. 

Taako is… gorgeous. 

And Kravitz knows that, has always known that, but he traces Taako’s features with his eyes like it’s the last time he’ll ever see him. Forgets so easily about his inability to tell whether Taako’s flirting is sincere, forgets about their limited time and his reoccurring lives. 

And it’s just Taako, his fingers pressed into Kravitz’s wrist, ghost of a smile still on his face. Close enough that Kravitz can count the freckles on his face, close enough to hear Taako’s breathing. Slow, steady, almost expectant.

And it’s nice. It’s so, so nice, and Kravitz is almost, almost willing to take a leap on a thought that he regularly refuses to even form in the first place.

Taako’s ear twitches, and Kravitz’s eyes snap from Taako’s to track the movement. _Four months_ , says a part of his brain, the part of his brain that remembers last time Taako left and never came back, _in four months he’ll be gone forever so you can stop fooling yourself now_. Kravitz clears his throat, and picks a spot just above Taako’s eyes to look at.

“We should… we should probably clean this up.” He moves back from Taako and Taako lets go of his wrist.

Kravitz turns back towards the counter, moving to start putting other things away, when he can see Taako out of the corner of his eye lunge forward—

And then he’s getting hit square in the back with another handful of flour. 

“Victory!” crows Taako, and Kravitz spins around, sputtering about cheating, which Taako ignores completely to continue declaring himself the winner. 

Voices down the hall make Kravitz and Taako freeze and turn towards the entrance, just in time to see Lup and Lucretia get to the door and stop dead, previous conversation dying instantly. The both of them look at Taako and Kravitz, and then in unison, at the counter and floors around them. 

“What the fuck are you guys doing?” asks Lup finally. Kravitz lets out a nervous laugh, but Taako just crosses his arms, refusing to even look at the flour.

“Making pot roast,” says Taako. Lup looks at the disaster of the kitchen and then at Lucretia, and then back at the kitchen. 

“You’re on kitchen clean-up for this, I’m not helping you.” 

“I don’t— I have no idea what you’re talking about. Also, we’re gonna have to— we’re out of flour,” says Taako matter of factly, and Kravitz snorts, and it’s almost enough to get rid of the tension in kitchen.

Almost. 

Lup and Lucretia leave them to the disaster zone they’ve made here, and after a few minutes of cleaning, it’s filled with the same chatter as before. Taako is still easy to talk to, even if Kravitz’s heart skips a beat when they brush hands. 

(If he’s honest with himself— and he tries not to be, because it’s a hassle at times like this— it was doing that before today too, but he tries to pretend it’s just started now. 

He can’t really tell if that’s better or worse.)

It takes longer than expected to get rid of the flour, mostly because he and Taako are tracking it everywhere seconds after they finally get rid of it all. Eventually, Kravitz huffs as more flour comes off his pants and onto the floor. “Okay. This is stupid. We need to change clothes or we’ll be here all day.” 

“You know, if you wanted— wanted to get undressed, you just had to ask.” Taako laughs, doesn’t seem to notice Kravitz’s face heating up, and keeps talking without giving him a chance to respond. “You— yeah, we probably need— I’m sure someone somewhere on this ship has clothes that’ll fit you.” 

Kravitz tries not to wonder too hard about how much of that was a joke. Taako hands him off a random assortment of clothes and says that “at least some of them” should fit, before he heads off to his own room to change, and Kravitz ends up in a pair of too big sweatpants and a t-shirt that’s just slightly too tight (he has no idea who either article of clothing belongs to). 

Taako does a bad job of stifling a laugh when Kravitz comes out of the bathroom. 

“Hot,” he says, and Kravitz sighs.

“I’d say you try looking good in clothes that don’t fit but knowing you, you would pull it off.” 

For a second, Kravitz swears he sees Taako’s eyes widen, but it’s gone in an instant, replaced with a trademark smug grin. 

“You flatter me.”

With the flour tracking clothes gone, cleaning the kitchen is made much easier, and they fall back into comfortable conversation. Kravitz cracks a joke, Taako laughs, Kravitz’s eyes follow him tucking a loose strand of hair behind his ear. Taako catches him and winks before turning away. 

Kravitz isn’t a total moron. Or at least, he would like to think he’s not. He knows that Taako is flirting with him. He’s just not sure if it’s sincere flirting, or if Taako would ever actually act on it. 

Or hell, if Kravitz wants to act on it. 

(Okay, well, he does. It’s just that it’s— probably— not that simple.)

(He could just ask. Kravitz sincerely doubts Taako would be angry with him, although he might get laughed at.)

What if Kravitz asks and Taako says no? No, he’s not flirting, sorry Kravitz, that’s just how Taako is. Well— it would suck, muses Kravitz, but he could cope with that. He only sees Taako for less than a year his entire life, anyway.

So what if Kravitz asks and Taako says yes? Maybe this jumping situation is fine for Taako, but Taako’s not the one left behind every year is he? Isn’t the one who lives decades longer, who already has a pre-existing life when seven aliens come to his home and make him remember all the other pre-existing lives. 

Kravitz feels _old_. The details surrounding growing old are increasingly hazier with every passing cycle, but he still remembers it. And it’s a different kind of old than the seven, ripped from their lives and living one year over and over and over again. 

Instead of years, he has lifetimes. Big, big spans of time that he’s not sure his brain was ever meant to carry; so much of it is fuzzy of lacking in details. And then for anywhere between a day and a year, he has seven people who can barely comprehend what he’s going through, who can only relate distantly—

And then when they leave, he has no one at all. 

Maybe it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.

The rest of the night passes without further incident. As do the following days, and four months turns into one month turns into one week and before Kravitz knows it he’s saying goodbye to the crew. 

Again. 

They’re at the edge of town, and it’s as unceremonious as last time (Well, Magnus hugs him so tightly Kravitz think he might have cracked a rib, but other than that). They leave one by one, until it’s just him and Taako, again. 

“See you next time around,” says Kravitz. He’s been refusing to say goodbye this whole time; he’s not sure whether it’s for their benefit or his.

“Clear skies,” says Taako. Kravitz blinks. He hadn’t thought Taako was listening when he’d explained local slang to Lucretia. It’s a small gesture, but considering it’s one of the last ones he’ll get this time around, it means a lot. 

“Clear skies,” says Kravitz. Taako smiles, and follows his crew through the entrance to the town for the last time.

When the Starblaster leaves, after the initial Hunger attack, things go back to normal. As normal as they can when Kravitz feels like his mind wasn’t meant to hold him. 

Kravitz looks at himself in mirrors and sees details that weren’t there before; minor quirks that people gloss over but set him apart from everyone else on this plane. Being an exact replica of himself over and over again leaves him distorted from everyone else, matching only himself. 

It eases, with time. Fades into the background noise of his life. He doesn’t forget, can’t forget, wouldn’t want to forget, but it doesn’t rule him like he was afraid it might. For the most part, the rest of his life plays out the way one would expect.

Still. When Kravitz sees himself in windows, his movements don’t track the same way everyone else’s does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> rolls up 4 months late with starbucks. i was wrong about how long things would take me. but i CAN promise the next chapter sometime this week; chapter 3 turned out to be 18k (!!!) words, so i'm splitting it in half for readability and so ch3 isn't literally longer than the first two chapters combined. i just need to proofread the other 10k and they'll be here as ch4 in a couple days (friday at the absolute latest).
> 
> also if i'm not mistaken this is now the longest thing i've ever written. cheers. anyway thank you all so much for your lovely comments (i'm going back to reply to them all individually and this time round i will just reply asap instead of waiting until the next chapter is out kjdhsjghh) and kudos!!!! they really mean the world to me <3
> 
> you can find me on tumblr @tieflinggay and thank you again for reading!!!


	4. (Im)Permanence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's alcohol in this chapter! no alcoholism or anything, just social drinking, but in case anyone needed the content warned i figured i'd mention it!!

Kravitz is having a bad day. 

Actually, he’s been having a bad week, and the month or so before that wasn’t so great either. 

First that stupid insect bite (and of course he was bedridden for a week, and it’s not like that’s unusual but it was still a pain in the ass), then his bike broke down, and then everything with Cyris, which was more like six problems wrapped into one, and now Eliza is mad because he’s _sulking_ about it, as though she wouldn’t sulk about it if her girlfriend did any of the shit Kravitz’s boyfriend did. 

_Ex_ -boyfriend.

Okay. Maybe his friends are right and they all just need to loosen up a little bit. Maybe a night out would help him. 

Kravitz is the first one to the tavern, and it’s still early enough to be practically empty when he arrives. Only two other tables are occupied; one near the door with a couple of dwarves loudly discussing something about their work, and one next to the bar with an elf and two humans, conversation equally loud but much less dedicated to once topic. He makes a beeline for the bar, grabbing a seat at the counter. 

“Krav?” 

“Hmm?” Kravitz looks up from the spot on the counter he’d been staring at and blinks at the bartender before he’s able to place him. “Erik? I didn’t know you worked here.”

Erik grins. “Just started. Can I getcha anything?”

“Uh, a water at the moment. I’m just waiting on friends.”

“I wouldn’t judge you if you ordered a drink, you know.” Erik winks, and Kravitz gives the sort of laugh you’re expected to give to acquaintances even when they aren’t that funny. 

“Plenty of time for that later,” says Kravitz, and Erik gives the same laugh back. He slides Kravitz a glass of water, says it was good to catch up (Kravitz agrees even though they didn’t really catch up on anything at all), and tells Kravitz to holler if he needs anything. 

And then Kravitz is alone with his thoughts. Which, if he’s honest, he’s not a fan of. The dwarves at the door are just as loud as before, but too technical for Kravitz to distract himself by eavesdropping. 

The other table has gone bizarrely quiet. Their conversation was loud before (something about mushrooms; just because it was audible doesn’t mean Kravitz is tuned in), but it’s turned to whispers, although they’re not any less enthusiastic. Kravitz takes a sip of his water and tries to not make it obvious he’s trying to listen in. 

“...talk to him,” one of the humans, the older guy, is saying.

“Well, I don’t— don’t wanna leave yet,” says the elf, “so I’m not gonna—” 

“Why would we have to leave immediately—”

“No, he’s right,” injects the young women. “It’ll just be more of a hassle if we don’t.”

Kravitz doesn’t like to assume conversations are about him, but it’s not like the bar is full of people they could be talking about, and considering the topic seems to have only shifted when he walked in, it’s not an outlandish assumption. Which means he’s liable to get a conversation in a couple minutes. And while Kravitz isn’t blind, this is quite possibly the worst time for a guy to come chat him up. Regardless of how attractive he is.

The human man is still talking when Kravitz tunes back into the conversation. 

“...just saying—”

“God, fine— I’ll do it if you chug your ale.”

“I’m not gonna chug my ale so you can do something you were gonna do regardless— oh my god.”

The elf whoops fairly loudly, which at least gives Kravitz an excuse to turn around and look at their table, just in time to catch the woman down her entire drink. One of the dwarves by the front door claps as she slams the now empty mug onto the table and gives a lopsided grin. 

“I hate you both,” says the man, no longer trying to remain quiet, and then downs the rest of his drink too. Kravitz stifles a laugh and turns back towards the bar. 

Sure enough, he can hear a couple more seconds of muttered conversation, and then the scrape of a chair dragging across the ground. Moments later, the elf slides up next to him, and Kravitz sighs. 

“Look,” he says, before the stranger can get a word in, “If you’re here to buy me a drink, I appreciate it, I really do, but I’m really not in the mood—”

“You wound me,” says the elf, in a voice that indicates Kravitz hasn’t wounded him at all, “but I wasn’t, uh, wasn’t gonna offer. Just letting you know that, uhm, the Starblaster is— is parked a mile south of town, out by that big rock? The purple one?”

Kravitz blinks. And then blinks again. “Is this…” he trails off, trying to piece together what any of those words mean and trying to ignore how his face heats up under this stranger’s expectant grin. “Is this a proposition of some kind, because—”

“Only if you want it to be, my man.” He winks, and then laughs. “See you tomorrow, okay?”

“What?”

But the space next to him has been vacated; the elf’s friends get to their feet as he passes their table, and then all three of them are gone. 

“Hey, Erik?” Kravitz doesn’t tear his eyes from the door until he can hear Erik come up behind him. “I know I said I was waiting for friends, but do you wanna slide me a whiskey?”

The next morning when he wakes up, the resulting headache is at least partly hangover-related. It does not go away like it has the last few times when he stumbles upon new (old?) memories, and he still has to wear sunglasses on his trek out to the Starblaster (he’s so distracted he almost walks through a patch of overgrown plants, which gets him to pay attention fairly quickly. The last thing he wants is to be sick _again_ ). And the fact that he has to walk at all is infuriating— by the time he’s gotten to the ship he’s wishing they’d come just two or three weeks later so the repairs on his motorcycle would be done.

He’s just trying to figure out how he can get the attention of the occupants when the entrance opens, revealing Lup, grinning ear to ear. 

“Rough night, huh?”

“Can you please not speak so loud,” says Kravitz, and Lup laughs. “I promise this isn’t a normal occurrence.”

“I’m not judging.”

“Well, you are a little.” Kravitz squints at the plant life beside the Starblaster. “Also you guys should be careful, that tree is about to bloom, and the smell is both gross and toxic in large quantities.” 

Lup sighs. “Of course it is. Everything on this planet is trying to kill us. Alright, come on inside.” She turns on her heels and heads back inside, Kravitz following after her. “Kravitz is hungover,” she announces loudly as they enter the main room. 

“Sucks to be you,” says Barry, taking a sip of his coffee. Kravitz huffs and pushes his sunglasses up onto his head, squinting for a moment under the bright lights inside, not too much better than the sun. 

“You know, this is the first time in my life I’ve ever seen you guys, you could try for a better first impression.”

“Mhm,” says Lucretia. “Because showing up hungover is so much better than making fun of hungover people.”

Kravitz puts his sunglasses back down, which prompts more laughter than he might like. He’s not doing a good job of keeping the smile off his face. “I’m gonna get a glass of water.” 

When Kravitz comes back from the kitchen, the atmosphere has grown tense. There’s no chatter like he remembers, and it’s not because people are busy doing tasks. Even Lucretia, which the ability to remain focused on her writing regardless of what’s going on around her, seems distracted. 

His eyes track from crew member to crew member as he takes a sip of his water, and he—

Wait. 

Taako. Davenport. Lucretia. Lup. Merle. Barry. 

One, two, three, four, five, six—

“Where’s Magnus?” asks Kravitz. What was left of the upbeat aura of the crew vanishes, and the tension Kravitz had felt before grows. No one answers for a long moment; that in itself is answer enough.

“Beefed it,” says Taako. His voice is light, but controlled. “Kicked the bucket on like, day two. ‘Cause he’s a stupid dumbass, and he’s gotta— if he doesn’t touch everything he’ll combust.” 

It’s not Kravitz’s fault, but he still regrets not being around to tell the crew about the less than welcoming flora and fauna. It must show on his face because Barry pipes up.

“Don’t dwell on it. A god could have come down from the sky and told him to not pet a brightly coloured lizard with a teeth sharp as a knives and he still would have.” 

Somehow that’s not very reassuring, but Kravitz nods anyway.

“Have you guys found the Light yet?”

“No,” says Davenport, but before Kravitz can react, he continues, “We know where it is, we just don’t really want to risk anyone else without knowing what’s out there. We’ve been doing some research, but—”

“But it would be much faster if you just had someone on deck who knew, right?” cuts in Kravitz, and Davenport nods. Kravitz presses his lips together in a grim approximation of a smile. “I’m not a wildlife expert,” he continues, “But having lived here my whole life, I know a lot about the local dangers and how to avoid them. Are we close to the Light, at least?”

“Yeah,” interjects Barry, “As close as we could get and land still. It’ll take the better part of a day to get there in foot, and the canopy is too thick to fly overhead for retrieval.”

“I wouldn’t fly over anyway— most of the birds in this area are territorial. Not that I think they could dent a spaceship, but it might be a hassle anyway.” Kravitz takes a sip of his water and rubs his eyes with his other hand. “Right to work, I guess, huh?”

“I mean, I’m— I could do with making fun of you for— for being hungover some more.”

“Yeah that actually does sound more fun,” says Merle. 

“Oh, sure, mock my suffering. I see how it is. Better get it in now, ‘cause it’s not going to happen again, last night was— ….an exception.” As soon the words are out of his mouth, he realizes his mistake. “It’s not an interesting story.”

“You know that uh— that makes it sound more interesting, right?”

“It isn’t! I just don’t go out very much and I… needed to take my mind off of something.” It seems incredibly dumb now. Magnus is dead. Dead before Kravitz technically even met him, and he’s still hung up over a breakup? “It’s stupid,” he says, and Taako laughs.

“Okay, now you have— you’ve gotta tell us.”

“No, I mean just relatively meaningless stupid, not like funny stupid— it’s just be more of a downer—“ 

“Okay,” Taako cuts in, “I rolled an eighteen persuasion, so I think—”

“That’s good,” interrupts Merle, “Cause I rolled a seven.”

“Yeah that’s— that’s nothing,” says Kravitz.

“The eighteen, though,” presses Taako. 

Kravitz sighs. It’s not like it’s a secret, and he’d probably feel more stupid if he tried to keep it from them, but it’s still not fun gossip like they seem to think.

“Got cheated on,” he admits, “Followed abruptly by a rough break up. I went out with some friends to take my mind off of it and…” he trails off and shrugs. “I guess here we are.” As expected, the room, goes quiet. If he were in a better mood, he might be smug about it. “I did try to warn you it wasn’t funny.”

Okay. He can be smug and in a bad mood at the same time. 

“Oh,” says Lucretia, “that’s awful, I’m sorry.”

“Well, relatively speaking, we have, uh, bigger fish to fry—”

“No, uh, you can talk about it if you want, we don—”

“Actually I would really rather not,” says Kravitz, cutting Lup off. “Look, I do appreciate the sympathy, really. But my ex was a jealous assole and a cheater and I would actually much rather have some sort of work to throw myself into and just not think about it.” 

There’s a couple moment of silence, and then Taako drawls, “You’re in luck there, my man, we— all we have around here is work.”

“What work have you done in the past three days, Taako?” Davenport’s exasperation is sort of negated by the hint of a grin on his face, but Taako takes the bait anyway.

“If that’s how— how you feel I don’t have t— I can just stop cooking, you all can starve. See if Taako cares—”

“I mean I definitely did most of the cooking in the past week, along with triangulation—”

“My own fucking family, huh? This is how it’s gonna be?”

Kravitz smiles. 

It’s a long process, making sure the crew knows everything they need to know to survive on a recovery mission. So much of it is just instinct, or such an old habit he forgets to bring it up until someone says something contradictory. 

About a week or so into this research (loosely speaking), Lucretia starts writing down topics Kravitz’s knowledge doesn’t cover. Since it’s all localized, Kravitz is pretty sure they can just find everything else they need to know from library books. Kravitz offers his bike as transportation, and mentions that does mean only one of them can go in that case. 

Barry squints at him. “Doesn’t a motorcycle fit two people usually?” 

“Yes? Me and then one of you.”

Davenport shakes his head. “That uh— I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Well, why not? It’s my plane. I want to help.”

“Sure,” pipes up Merle, “But if you die here, that’s the end of it for this round. And you actually live here.”

“I— I just won’t die then.” 

“Yeah, funnily enough that philosophy is better in theory than in practice,” says Lup. “Listen, Krav, you _are_ helping us. But you don’t need to come out and risk your life when it doesn’t automatically end at the end of the year.” She pauses, and then adds, “But I do actually want the bike still.”

It takes another few minutes of bickering, this time over who has relevant skill sets and who wants to go the most before the plan settles on Lup and Barry running retrieval this time round. Not everyone is happy with this, but Kravitz doubts anyone’s ever one hundred percent happy with splitting up the party. 

The bike offer stands still, so when the day the repairs are done rolls around, Kravitz says he’ll just swing by the library on the way there. Taako volunteers to come with him, and Kravitz doesn’t say anything about this being a one person job. He’d be glad for the company in any case. 

Once they get to the library, they’re actually making fairly good time. 

“I can’t— who would have thought the, uh, the Dewey Decimal System was an in— inter-dimensional constant,” says Taako offhandedly, and Kravitz laughs. 

“It is familiar,” says Kravitz, although he’s not really talking about the Dewey Decimal system. Taako grabs a book off the shelf and hands it to Kravitz, saying something Kravitz only half processes, too busy musing about past lives. Taako keeps moving, and Kravitz follows, idly searching the shelves for anything else they may need.

“We have one more book to track down I think,” he says, checking the list of topics Lucretia gave him and shifting the two books he already has in order to carry them more comfortably. “I think there’s a general guide on this by Brown or Braun or some other br name…” He trails off, tracing his fingers down the shelves, looking for a title that catches his eyes. 

“This would be so much easier if we had like, a list of actual books that we need,” whines Taako, trying to look for the book while seeming like he couldn’t care any less. “Do you have a n— a title that’s not ‘general guide’?” 

“Nope,” says Kravitz, reaching the end of the row without finding anything. “Just look for anything that looks like it’s about like, soil composition.”

“Soil composition,” mutters Taako darkly. Kravitz is about to move down to the next row when loud talking from the front of the library catches his attention. If he’s honest, he recognizes the voice, but he’s really hoping he’s wrong, so he peeks around the corner of the shelves. 

The speaker quiets down only a little— still much louder than is expected in a library— as he’s talking to the librarian, and _of course_ it’s him. 

Cyris never was great at behaving in public. Kravitz scowls and ducks back behind the shelves before he can be seen, and then internally chides himself over hiding. He’s a grown adult and he can handle seeing his ex in a public place, where he’s allowed to be. It’s fine. It’s not like they were going to avoid each other for the rest of time. 

“What?”

Kravitz snaps his gaze over to Taako, who’s gotten much closer in an attempt to whisper. 

“What?” he echoes. 

“You’re not— something’s bothering you, clearly, so uh— so spill. What?”

“It’s nothing,” says Kravitz, and ignores Taako’s skeptical look. After a moment, Taako shrugs, and goes back to perusing the shelves. Kravitz takes a sidestep that is definitely not to retreat farther out of sight from people outside their aisle, because he’s a grown man and he can deal with talking to his ex in public. 

Taako sighs, heavily, almost like it pains him, and then turns to Kravitz, putting his hands on his hips. “Okay, well, you’re gonna— you need to tell me what’s up, uh, so the plot can move forward.”

Kravitz snorts, and then relents. “Okay, uh, don’t make fun of me—” 

“No promises,” Taako interrupts. 

“—but my ex boyfriend’s just walked in and I’m… avoiding him.”

“Where?” Taako immediately steps forward and leans his head out past the end of the aisle to look. “What’s he look like?”

Kravitz puts a hand out, unsure of exactly what he plans to do but knowing that he should stop Taako from being so fucking obvious; in end, he just waves it ineffectually and hisses at Taako. 

“Stop— please be more subtle—”

Taako takes a half step back, but his eyes are still searching. “Who?”

“The redhead by the front— Taako, please—”

Finally (and Kravitz thanks every deity he knows that they haven’t been noticed yet), Taako steps back, far enough to be out of sight. 

“Man’s painfully average looking, Krav, thought you had better taste.”

Kravitz bites back a retort about his taste that would come off as a little too forward and sighs. Taako leans around the corner again, albeit this time a little more discreetly. He’s silent for a couple seconds, and then says, “You said he was jealous, right?” 

Kravitz hums an assent. “Rich of him to get pissed at me whenever I so much as looked at another guy while he was cheating on me, but yes.” 

“Think he’s still just as jealous?”

When Kravitz looks over at Taako, eyebrows raised, he can already see the beginning of a smug grin forming on Taako’s face. “Oh, probably,” he says, “Why?”

“Feel li— uh, wanna do something mildly petty and ver— uh, super overdramatic to set him off?”

Kravitz doesn’t know what Taako’s exact plan is, but his grin mirrors Taako’s already. “I could do petty and dramatic.”

“You and me both. Okay, undo the, uh, like the top three buttons of your shirt. And put those books on— in the empty spot there, on the shelf.” As Taako talks, he lets his hair loose from the messy bun it’s in, running his fingers through it. Kravitz gets the idea and puts the books down, but Taako keeps explaining anyway. “Then we uh, we go out there, make like we’re sneaking past, get caught, uh, obviously because where’s the— what’s the point if we don’t, I pretend t— make like I’m your new beau, make some euphemisms, hold hands, make a break for it.”

“And then profit.” Kravitz undoes the top three buttons of his shirt, and then hesitates. It’s not that Taako is a bad liar— on the contrary, Taako is an incredibly smooth talker and has an undeniable (if a little alien) charm to him— but he does have a couple obvious tells that make lying a roll of the dice. “You sure we can pull this off?”

“Okay, I know I’m, uh, I’m out of your league—” Taako fumbles through his pocket and pulls out a tube of lipstick.

Kravitz rolls his eyes. “That is not what I meant by that question at all.”

“—but we’ve got this. Wait, uh, what’s your ex’s Wisdom stat look like?”

“Pretty shit.”

“Then, yeah. We’re— we’ll be fine.” Taako leans over to the side to see where Cyris is before standing up straight again and applying the lipstick— the bright turquoise doesn’t exactly match his outfit, but Kravitz assumes he’s going for what is obvious instead of what is stylish (also, he still looks good, not the Kravitz was noticing). “Once I pretended to da— pretended that I was, uh, Lucretia’s boyfriend, so I think—”

“There is no way that worked.” All due respect to Taako and Lucretia and their respective lying ability, but pretending they’re straight, let alone straight for each other, sounds like miracle work.

“You’re severely over— overestimating how observant straight people are.” 

“I try to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

“Oh don’t even bother, it’s always a let down,” Taako raises a thumb to his lips, about to very obviously smear the lipstick, and then stops, squinting at Kravitz for a second.

“Can I kiss you?” asks Taako, endlessly casual, and Kravitz’s mind short-circuits.

“Wh-huh?” 

“Just your cheek,” says Taako distractedly, as though he hasn’t noticed the increasingly flustered look on Kravitz’s face. “I mean, if I— it doesn’t make any sense for me to just h— just have messy lipstick on my ow— by myself, although if y—”

“Right,” says Kravitz, “Right, right right right— yes of course.” _Stupid._ Kravitz is careful not to dwell on the disappointment. “Go for it.” Does he sound too eager? 

“Great,” says Taako, dropping the lipstick tube back into his pocket. “Try not to swoon too much,” he jokes, and then grabs Kravitz’s lapels and kisses his jawline— firm, and far, far too sweetly for Kravitz to heed Taako’s warning. 

Then again, gods know he’s been swooning since day one. 

The whole interaction takes maybe three seconds, and then it’s over. Taako lets go of his lapels and for a split second, his expression is so sincere that Kravitz forgets entirely about the half-baked plan they have. 

But it’s over when Taako’s ears perk up, and he gives a wide grin before leaning over to peer past the edge of the aisle again. “Oh shit, he’s coming this way— Hold up, this is so much better— okay, back up so your back is against the bookshelf.” 

Kravitz blinks and takes a couple rushed steps backwards until his shoulder blades hit the shelf. Taako steps up close to him, so that there’s only a few inches between them, and places his hands on either side of Kravitz, head tilted slightly, gaze unfocused, presumably trying to tell where Cyris is by sound alone. 

Kravitz is oddly short on breath; tension he doesn’t know what to go with is collecting in his chest. For one brief, all-consuming, déjà vu inducing moment, he wants to throw caution and Cyris to the wind follow through on this plan to fullest extent—

Taako winks, and then pulls three books off the shelf and sends them all tumbling towards the ground. 

The noise immediately attracts attention, and sure enough, seconds later Cyris pokes his head around the corner. Taako jumps backward a split second later, collecting the books and wearing a sheepish look that’s doing a bad job of hiding his grin. 

“Kravitz?” And there it is— Cyris’s voice has a familiar hard edge to it. It’s more infuriating now than it was when they were dating. At least then, it had just been minor jealousy issues. Now, it makes him a controlling asshole and a hypocrite. This is a fake-out, obviously, but he feels slighted like Cyris had interrupted something real. 

“Krav, babe, you know this guy?” Taako has gotten back to his feet and is sliding the books back into their place on the shelves. Cyris looks even more put out by this remark, which lifts Kravitz’s spirits considerably, despite his annoyance.

He tries to look at least a little flustered and does up some of the buttons of his shirt again (Cyris tracks the movement with his eyes and then widens them when he spots the lipstick mark, and Kravitz doesn’t bother to hide the beginnings of a smug grin). 

“Yes, I—”

“We used to date,” says Cyris coldly. “Kravitz, who’s this?”

“Don’t interrupt me,” says Kravitz, and Cyris blinks. Kravitz turns back to Taako, and continues as though Cyris hadn’t said anything. “He’s my ex.”

“You didn’t tell me you had an ex,” says Taako. His ears twitch but Cyris either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care; out of the corner of his eye Kravitz can see him getting more and more annoyed. 

“Yes, I didn’t think it was going to come up.”

“Does it even have to?”

“I’m right here!” 

Taako ignores him and keeps talking. “I mean we— we were just about to leave anyway.” He conspicuously runs his fingers through his hair and tucks some of it behind his ears. “What, uh— the book that we were getting should just be behind you.” 

Kravitz turns and grabs the two books he'd put on the shelf, and then scans where Taako is pointing— sure enough, there’s a copy of _Soil And What Grows In It_ by J. Bryan. He grabs that too, before tucking all three books under his arm and turning back to face his ex. 

“As much as I’d love to catch up,” he says, and Taako laughs, “I’m busy right now.”

“Clearly,” says Cyris, followed by, with a note of concern that almost sounds real (although, Kravitz notes with some satisfaction, no suspicion, despite Taako being unable to keep a straight face), “This isn’t like you, Kravitz.” It’s not a new line, and Kravitz knows it’s code for ‘other people are listening but I don’t like what you’re doing’. 

“Well, I guess we both misjudged each other’s characters, then.” Kravitz ignores the hurt look on Cyris’s face, and out of the corner of his eye spots Taako extending his hand for a high five. As much as Kravitz wants to, he feels like that’s pushing the limits of ‘obvious ruse’, so he just takes Taako’s hand instead, lacing their fingers together. Taako’s ears twitch again, but he takes it in stride. “Let’s go.”

Cyris catches Kravitz’s other wrist as he passes and gives Kravitz a pleading look. A _can we make things better_ look, a look that precedes an apology and a promise to change. Change that never came— or change on Kravitz’s end and not on Cyris’s. 

“Don’t touch me,” Kravitz snarls, pulling his wrist from Cyris’s grasp and nearly dropping the books he’s holding in the process. Cyris’s eyes widen, and then narrow, but Kravitz doesn’t plan to stick around long enough for a fight. He adjusts his books and turns his back on Cyris.

“My place again?” prompts Taako, and Kravitz’s grin comes back. He doesn’t turn around to see Cyris’s reaction. 

“Can hardly wait.” 

He almost expects Cyris to cause a scene as they walk away from him; it wouldn’t be the first time. But there’s only silence, and then Kravitz drags Taako to the checkout as fast as possible to keep that silence going. 

As soon as they get outside, Kravitz says, “I can’t believe he bought that.” 

“Yeah when you said he had a shit Wisdom modifier I had my doubts but—” Taako whistles, and Kravitz laughs. “Hold— wait, your collar is still, uh, still fucked up, let me—“ Taako reaches over and smoothes out Kravitz’s collar. “Also you should probably, uh— lipstick—”

“Oh,” says Kravitz, “Yeah, uhm—” He licks his thumb, and the drags it across the lipstick mark in what is (judging by Taako’s expression) a futile attempt to get rid of it. “I made it worse, right?”

“Sure did.” Taako roots through his pockets again— there must be an enchantment on them because there’s absolutely no way the pockets on those pants normally fit even half of the stuff Taako puts in there— and pulls out an individually wrapped alcohol swab. “Hold still,” he says, ripping the packet open and then carefully wiping the stain off of Kravitz’s face. 

“Thanks,” Kravitz says, and then, “We should probably go, uh, pick up my bike now.” 

“Sure thing,” says Taako, “Lead the way, babe.”

Kravitz rolls his eyes. “Alright, darling, follow my lead.” He offers his elbow and Taako takes it, practically draping himself onto Kravitz as they head out. And if they’re a little closer than is called for by the joke despite the lack of audience, neither of them says anything. 

Retrieving the motorcycle is mostly painless, aside from some paperwork that Taako complains about despite not being the one filling it out. 

As soon as they get the bike outside, Taako says, “Alright I’m— I wanna drive.” 

“Do you know how to drive?” 

“I can drive a spaceship, I’m pretty— pretty fuckin’ sure I can figure out a motorcycle.”

“Not that I doubt your abilities, but that sounds like a ‘no’ to me.” Kravitz laughs at Taako’s exaggerated scowl and says, “Alright, give it a go.”

“Oh shit, really?” Taako doesn’t wait for a response before swinging his leg over the bike, and then revving the engine. 

“Be careful. You break it, you bought it, and whatnot.” Or in this case, you break it you pay for the second set of repairs. 

“Don’t worry, I’m— I’ll be gentle.” Taako gives him the biggest shit eating grin possible, revs the engine again to drown out any potential retort from Kravitz, and then accelerates much much faster than a first time driver should. 

Taako’s not an abysmal driver, thinks Kravitz, watching Taako round a barely controlled corner at the end of the street. He’s not going to be winning any fantasy drag races, but he’s not awful. 

It’s only a couple minutes before Taako brings the motorcycle to a (too close for comfort) stop in front of him.

“Okay I’m d— I had my fun.” Taako shrugs as Kravitz raises his eyebrows, dismounting the bike. “It’s no spaceship.” His tone is dismissive, but Kravitz isn’t fooled. 

“It takes a lot of practice to be good at any vehicle, you weren’t gonna be perfect on the first go.”

“How da— I’m a fantastic driver,” says Taako. Kravitz gives a non-committal hum which Taako purposefully ignores. “I was doing it badly on purpose. Can’t wait until Magnus is back, he’s uh, he’s gonna be so fuckin’ pissed about missing the motorcycle.”

Taako’s smile hasn’t even shifted, but Kravitz’s slips. Of course. Magnus. Magnus would’ve loved this. 

Guilt gnaws at him; it’s like every time he worries too much about his own problems he’s disrespecting Magnus’s memory, or that he’s not focusing enough on finding the Light. 

“How do you do this?”

“You’re gonna— I need more info than that, my man.”

“Have… any level of normalcy when someone dies. Or even when you haven’t found the Light yet.” Taako’s shoulders tense, and Kravitz heads him off at the pass. “That’s not an accusation. I just…” He trails off. He just what? Doesn’t deal with death a lot? He’s second only to the crew with the number of lifetimes he’s lived. 

“Well I mean— not to, uh— I get that or whatever but why _bother_?” Taako jars him out of his thoughts. “I know he’s gonna be back at the end of the year. And I— we super don’t have the kinda time it takes to properly mourn someone.” Taako tilts his head and grins, voice losing the hard edge it had developed. “Also, it’s Magnus, and he’d be mad if we didn’t have fun without him. In fact I— it’s actually uh, actually disrespectful to not be constantly fucking around.”

Kravitz laughs; bittersweet, but genuine. He gets the impression that that’s all he’ll get from Taako in the way of advice. At most, the crew has to wait a year to see one another again. It is probably easier for them to just postpone mourning until it’s no longer relevant. 

Hell, Kravitz is considering it, and he’d have to postpone it for much, much longer. 

“I could probably do a wheelie.” Kravitz clears his throat. “You know, in Magnus’s honour.” 

“Hell yeah my man!” 

Kravitz’s wheelie, while not technically flawless, does still look pretty sick, and it makes Taako laugh, so he considers it a success. They head back to the Starblaster in mostly high spirits, ready to put the finishing touches on the crew’s plan. 

Despite the added preparations, things do not go as planned.

Lup and Barry go out to find the Light, and Lup comes back a day later with it, by herself, eyes grim. Kravitz runs over in his mind if there was anything he missed when telling them about the wildlife, but he can’t think of anything. Lup tells him there was nothing he could have done and doesn’t tell anyone how Barry died. 

“They’ll come back,” says Lucretia, one night while they’re the last two awake. He hadn’t realized he’d been so visibly distraught, but then again, the whole crew— what’s left of it— is more subdued that normal. 

“Not for me,” he says. “I remember you guys, but this visit, it is once in a lifetime.”

“Then how is this different from us leaving?” 

Kravitz sucks in a breath. “Not sure,” he admits. Lucretia stares at him with curious eyes. “Hypothetically it’s all sort of moot since I only see you for a year anyway and then live out the rest of my life and then it restarts and then I remember you again so in the long run, missing someone once or having one of you uh, die early, it’s not that different.” He rubs the bridge of his nose and idly flips the page of the book he’s been pretending to read for awhile. “Death is… I mean I can’t really think of it as permanent but it’s certainly much harsher.”

Lucretia is silent for a moment, with a resigned sadness that doesn’t match how young she looks. It’s not something Kravitz has really thought about— he’s never asked, and ages are relative with the whole time travel, dimension hopping thing, but she can’t have been more than nineteen or twenty when this all started. 

“It certainly is,” says Lucretia finally. And Kravitz suddenly feels more sorry for the living crew members than either of the dead ones.

“Lucretia,” he says quietly, “Do any of you have a plan in case whatever is causing you to come back every year stops working?”

“Theoretically as long as the Bond Engine keeps working we’re fine, and if it stops working we’re all toast anyway so it’s moot.” Lucretia scribbles something in the margins of her page without looking at Kravitz. “But I suppose we just mourn.”

The implications of that are heavy; the crew just doesn’t mourn right now. They don’t have the time or the energy or don’t see the point when the person is just going to come back before their death really has time to settle. They don’t have the resources. 

The IPRE crew is running in more ways than one. Kravitz gets the impression that if something stopped them, it wouldn’t be long until they fall apart. 

“Sorry,” he says, “Little heavy for smalltalk, huh.”

“Wow, I didn’t notice,” says Lucretia dryly, and Kravitz laughs.

The rest of the year is, thankfully, death free. It is still mildly dangerous, at least in comparison to Kravitz’s previous lives, but he sticks around and gives advanced warnings for when nature’s about to turn on them and how to survive it. 

The remaining crew turns their attention to figuring out why Kravitz is still coming back. It’s all far beyond Kravitz, even when they put it in layman’s terms— especially since they don’t even seem to know exactly how they’re reappearing every year. 

“So we’ve narrowed it down to probably definitely the Bond Engine,” says Lup, one afternoon near the end of the year, “And I know what you’re thinking, isn’t that the only thing we had to go on at the beginning? And the answer is yes, but we have figured out that you’re not… written into it like the rest of us are.”

“Our best guess so far is that something in that first cycle we saw you tripped you up into the engine and you’re being… dragged along. Or some part of you is.” Davenport seems doubtful still. “It’s the ship doing something, but Bond Mechanics— they were a totally new form of tech when we left and there’s only the seven of us studying them so while it may be actually common behaviour from that tech, we don’t have any previous missions to compare to.” 

Kravitz nods, waiting for an inevitable question about his experience that he definitely won’t be able to answer. 

“Lucretia’s going through her journals to help but do you remember anything from that first cycle that might have prompted any reaction from the Bond Engine? Any particular experiences that year, people you met, anything like that?”

Kravitz’s gaze flickers around the table at the remaining crew, resting perhaps a split second too long on Taako. But that hardly counted, did it? Just meeting T— the IPRE wouldn’t be enough to trigger the Bond Engine. They meet people all the time. Kravitz shakes his head. 

No one is surprised by that answer. 

The end of the year comes too quickly, as always. Kravitz says his _See you later_ ’s and tells them to let Magnus know he was sorry to have missed him. 

When he tries to think back to any emotional ties that could have caused this from that first lifetime, he can only come up with the one answer.

* * *

If Kravitz could remember when it happened, the way he’s greeted every lifetime is almost exactly the same. Always by Taako, who never bothers to explain anything, only gives him a meeting place, says “See you tomorrow,” and leaves. 

And Kravitz does. Every time, launched into what usually ends up being the most chaotic year of his life, helping save his (current) world from being destroyed. 

In what is, according to the crew, cycle twenty five for them, they find Kravitz very early on. Only a few weeks. They haven’t found the Light, and this time, Kravitz has nothing to help them. He keeps an eye out, and they crew keep working, but every check-in turns up empty handed, until the mention of the Light makes Kravitz’s chest tighten up.

This is a new stressor. His friends comment that he seems high strung lately and he laughs because it’s very hard to explain that seven aliens haven’t yet figured out if they’re going to survive the end of the year. 

He calls his family a little more often. Just in case. 

Tensions run high the last month of the cycle. They haven’t found the light, and despite the constant assurances from the crew that they could still find it, Kravitz knows them well enough now to know when they’re lying. When they’ve been beaten. 

Lup is the most insistent. She seems to be the polar opposite of her brother; Taako has done nothing but clam up when the Light is mentioned for the last month. But Lup… Lup has circles under her eyes and pages on pages of notes she’s read a billion times. 

Kravitz feels awful about it. It’s not that he thinks Lup would give up if he wasn’t here, but at this point… even she must know. Even she must know, after several cycles, when they aren’t going to find it. Her energy seems almost performative sometimes, like there’s something she’s pretending for. 

In the end, he has to bring it up. He’s at the table with Lup, Barry, Taako and Davenport— at Barry and Lup’s insistence— to go over notes again. Lup is saying something but Kravitz isn’t really listening, just watching the clearly false look of boredom on Taako’s face. 

Even Davenport looks grim, and Kravitz can’t take it anymore.

“I know you aren’t going to find it,” says Kravitz, looking at his hands instead of at Lup. Lup freezes, and then looks over at Kravitz. 

“Huh?”

“The Light,” says Kravitz. “I know you aren’t going to find it. I’ve been here for months and you guys have done pretty much everything you can but it’s a big planet. You don’t have to pretend that you still have places left to look for my sake.” 

Silence settles heavy on the room after that. 

“What if you don’t come back?” Lup says finally. In the chair next to Kravitz, Taako tenses and seems to fold in on himself. "We've always found the Light. The world you're in has always continued unconsumed after we left. What if this is the ball game?"

Kravitz blinks. 

“Honestly? That hadn’t crossed my mind.” 

“It’s crossed ours,” says Lup shortly. Kravitz blinks again, and then looks away from her over to Barry, who shrugs in an almost nonchalant agreement, and at Davenport who, despite the serious tone of the conversation, winks at him. Taako won’t look up from the table. 

“Oh,” says Kravitz. 

“Yeah,” says Lup. Silence follows this for a few seconds before Kravitz pushes on. 

“I’m not wrong though. You aren’t going to find it. And if… well, I don’t know about the me not coming back. But I do think our time would be better spent not pretending to each other that this particular vein is still a rich one.” 

“What do you— what’s your other option, then?” Taako speaks up for the first time, still not looking up from the table. 

Kravitz chews on his bottom lip. “A couple bottles of red wine and a card game?” 

Taako laughs. Really laughs, a sound Kravitz hasn’t heard in awhile. Even the other crew members snicker a little. “I’m sure Dav’s got a few vintages he— we could convince him to— to pop open.”

“I wouldn’t be completely opposed,” says Davenport. 

Kravitz smiles. “Well,” he says, “Actually, it’s not a red, but I have a bottle of champagne at home that I’ve been saving for a special occasion.”

“‘S your funeral, homie.” 

Kravitz gives a grim smile at that. “Guess it is.”

The night is… weird, after that. Kravitz gets his bottle of champagne and Magnus insists they shake it before popping it open and Davenport and Lup both complain that they’ll have to clean the floors if they do that. Kravitz tries to point out it’s a waste of champagne and Merle pipes up that you just have to immediately start drinking from the bottle once it’s open. 

Kravitz doesn’t bother to point out that that seems a little undignified for champagne.

They don’t shake the bottle. Kravitz pours everyone a glass, which burns through the bottle pretty quick. They play a game of poker, which Kravitz almost wins, but Davenport has an absolutely unreadable poker face so he ends up folding. 

After two glasses of wine, Merle offers to write a eulogy for Kravitz. 

“Sounds like it might kill the vibe,” says Kravitz. 

“Offer’s on the table,” says Merle, before turning away to go bother someone else. In the few seconds it takes for Kravitz to recover from that exchange, Taako appears beside him and tops up his wine glass, and then tops up his own. 

“He says that, uh, that dumb shit every fuckin’ time.” Taako takes a deep swig from his glass. “Do not take him up on that offer. Actually uh— just in general, if you have to write a eulogy? Don’t ca— just find someone else to do it. Not him.” 

“You sound like you’re in the know.” 

Taako smiles. “One time Davenport, uh, got a pretty severe infection right at the end of the year. It was— kinda a fifty-fifty shot of whether he’d pull through to the next year on his own, or if he’d die before— before— if he’d have to rely on the reset.” He takes another, less dramatic, sip of his wine. “Maybe it’s— it’s probably morbid, but we held a funeral before— before we reset, because if he died, we knew we’d be too busy to uh, to hold a proper one. Merle did a shitty eulogy, Magnus cried, Davenport told us all off for wasting time.” 

Kravitz laughs, struck again— not for the first time, and certainly not for the last— about how the crew handles and doesn’t handle death. All of them seemed to flip between it being a tragedy and a comedy.

Kravitz doesn’t remember dying, not with any detail. He knows he did, and even though things blur together he even kind of knows the causes, but he doesn’t remember dying the way he remembers other events. His memories fade out so much by the end of his lives that those memories have a surreal, dreamlike quality. He can’t reconcile them as having happened to him, can’t get his mind around what it feels like to die. 

He wonders if he’ll remember this time. 

Provided he’s even around another time to find out. 

“Still in there?” Taako waves a hand in front of Kravitz’s face, and now it’s Kravitz’s turn to take a particularly long drink. 

“For now.”

Taako lets out a bark of laughter that’s almost harsh and clinks his glass with Kravitz’s. “Hell yeah,” he says, and Kravitz laughs too.

At three glasses of wine, Kravitz is _good_. Not drunk quite yet, but definitely not sober, either. More reserved than he would be normally, but hey, it’s his funeral. The knowledge that they’re all here together because Kravitz didn’t want to pretend he’s not going to die hangs over their heads; a very big cloud in an otherwise clear sky.

“Merle. Got any eights?” asks Kravitz. 

Merle, despite the earlier eulogy comment, seems to be the only one relaxed enough to genuinely enjoy himself. Kravitz knows he’s gravitating towards Merle because of that, but sue him for getting tired of catching somber looks from everyone else. 

“Nope,” says Merle, almost delighted, “go fish.”

“You know you have to tell me if you do have them, right,” says Kravitz, but reaches towards the centre pile anyway. Magnus, from his spot next to Merle, not so subtly leans back. 

“No eights,” says Magnus, which gets a ‘hey!’ from Merle as he brings his cards to his chest so Magnus can’t see them anymore. 

Kravitz laughs and draws his card; a six. “Damn. Okay, Taako, go.”

“Krav. Six?”

Kravitz turns his head slightly and narrows his eyes. Taako gives him a look that is the picture of innocence, if that picture had the words GUILTY, DO NOT TRUST written across it in bright red letters. 

“You’re cheating.” Kravitz pulls his own cards flush to his chest and glares at Taako, who laughs in response.

“Wine bringing dow— down the ol’ passive perception huh? Happens to the best of us.” 

This prompts another round of laughter and Kravitz tries to stop himself from smiling, and for a moment he forgets that this is technically a funeral and just enjoys the company of his friends. 

It’s nice, while it lasts.

Barry goes to bed first; it’s not that early, around ten, but they tease him anyway. 

“You guys,” says Magnus seriously, “It’s not fair to make fun of senior citizens.” 

Barry flips him off as he heads down the hall to his room, which only makes them all laugh harder. 

( Ten minutes later when Magnus decides to go to bed himself, he plugs his ears as he walks out of the room to avoid facing the consequences. )

One by one, the crew starts to peel off to go to sleep, until suddenly Kravitz turns from an in-depth conversation with Taako to ask for a second opinion from Davenport, only to find the room empty except for the two of them. Taako seems to notice too, muttering, “And of course they d— they left all the fuckin’ champagne flutes out. Typical.”

Kravitz snorts a laugh and Taako hides a smile behind his wine glass. He puts the now empty glass on the table in front of them before leaning back to where he was sitting before. Which feels closer than Kravitz recalls, somehow.

His head feels like this because of the wine, probably. Mostly. Partially. In any case, it is making him sleepy, and perhaps slightly bolder than normal. Kravitz finishes his drink and leans his head on Taako’s shoulder. Taako stiffens for a second, and then relaxes again. 

“Do you want me to move?”

“Nah, homie.” Taako clicks his tongue, and shifts slightly, careful not to throw Kravitz off. “Man, you s— you are not comfy, though. I didn’t, uh— wouldn’t have described someone’s face as bony before, but y— you certainly fit the bill.” 

There’s a few moments of comfortable silence, and then the main worry of the night seeps into Kravitz’s head, makes him voice a wistful thought that he’s been having for much longer than just one night.

“I wish we had more time.” 

“We kinda do.” Taako doesn’t say it, but the word _‘did’_ is evident in his tone.

“I bet it feels like that from your end.”

There’s silence for a moment, and then Taako says, “Well what the fuck is that supposed to mean, huh?” 

“It means it doesn’t feel like we have time from my end, Taako.” He sighs. “I dunno. It’s like we have forever but we also only ever have less than a year.”

The statement hangs in the air for several sobering seconds. 

“Would you w— would you have wanted us to leave you alone?” says Taako abruptly. Kravitz blinks, and then pushes himself up off of Taako’s shoulder to look at him. 

“What?”

“Like when we come— come into a new plane. Would you rather we didn’t talk to you and try to avoid triggering your memory thing?”

“Oh, God no.” Kravitz doesn’t even have to think about it. “I’d still rather have some time than no time at all.” And to miss those returned memories… it may not actually affect him. He’s still a whole and distinct person each time before the IPRE arrives. But he likes this version of him. The cumulative one. The one who remembers his previous friends and families. Having the memories dumped on him is a weight to carry, yes, but it’s still better than being deprived of knowing the weight at all. 

Loved and lost, or something. 

“Wow. Quick answer.”

“Well, wouldn’t you want to remember in my place?”

“Well I— I’m not in the business of forgetting and re-remembering entire lifetimes—”

“Knock on wood,” says Kravitz, and Taako sticks his tongue out before he continues. 

“—But I think yeah. Yeah, I’d, uh, I’d wanna remember too.” Taako tilts his head and then mutters something unintelligible under his breath, and then clears his throat. “It’s getting late, we should probably sleep.”

Kravitz hums an assent and puts the empty wine glass he’s been holding down on the coffee table, before leaning over and laying on the couch. Taako snorts quietly as he gets to his feet, collecting Kravitz’s wine glass along with his own. 

“You sleeping there?”

“Yes,” says Kravitz. His back is going to kill him in the morning and it’s not exactly warm here, but the thought of going to the next room exhausts him, let alone walking home. 

“Suit yourself,” says Taako, taking the dishes to the kitchen. Kravitz is asleep before Taako returns. 

When he wakes up, there’s a blanket over him. Taako doesn’t mention it, so neither does Kravitz, but the gesture sticks in his mind like honey. 

The end of the year is upon them much faster than Kravitz would like. 

It’s a familiar scene, saying goodbye to the crew, but there’s a note of finality to it that Kravitz isn’t used to— preparation in case this really is the end. 

And then it’s just him and Taako, saying goodbye. 

Again. The unusual exchanges take only moments and then, instead of heading back into the Starblaster, Taako stands there. And stands, and stands, until Kravitz is about to ask—

“Come with us,” blurts Taako. Kravitz furrows his brow. 

“I thought that didn’t work.”

“Well, probably not, but it uh, at this point, would it hurt to try?”

For a moment, he’s tempted. Oh, he is so, so, tempted, standing here with the world about to end. He wants to say yes to Taako’s earnest expression, wants to take his hand and get back on the ship and never look back. 

Reality comes crashing back in a second later. What the IPRE does isn’t a fun road trip or romantic getaway. And he can’t really do what they do— his death is still permanent. Or rather, impermanent in a way that’s different than theirs. He doesn’t even have any skills needed by the crew; he’s useful because of his knowledge of the world. With the world he knows left behind, what would he even do?

And more than that, he has friends here. Family. People he hasn’t said goodbye to. The seven didn’t have a choice to leave their world behind. He does have that choice. And it’s stupid, it’s so stupid, and Kravitz knows that, they’ll all die regardless of whether he stays or goes, but all the same...

“I can’t.” Kravitz sees Taako’s shoulders tense and is reminded, again, like always, that no matter how close he gets to the crew they never quite seem to understand his life. “I— I know it doesn’t really matter, because everyone’s going to die and I can’t save them by staying but I— if it works, and I chose…” He takes a deep breath. “I want to. But this is my home, just as much as anywhere else has been. Do you know what I mean?”

“Oh, absolutely not.” Taako laughs. “But I— I think‚ uh, I have a different— I’ve never called a place home. Except the Starblaster, but even that’s sort of— sort of by necessity. I think if— if I really had to, I can get… something about—” Taako gestures at Kravitz, “Your whole thing.” 

“Thank you,” says Kravitz, and then on impulse, stands on his tiptoes and kisses Taako’s forehead. When he’s flat on his feet again, Taako raises his eyebrows, and Kravitz might be flustered about it if only he wasn’t about to die.

“You’re send— I’m getting some mixed signals here.” 

“Yeah, we can talk about them after this.” 

“I’m holding you to that,” says Taako, lingers for a split second, and then says, “Bye,” and closes the door to the Starblaster, yelling at Davenport to get going as he does. 

Unceremonious and abrupt as always. Kravitz checks his watch almost reflexively as the Starblaster takes off— it of course tells him nothing about how much time he has left, but every second spent standing here staring the space the Starblaster leaves behind is a second not spent maximizing his final moments, so he turns away and picks up the pace, not watching the Starblaster disappear. 

Almost as an afterthought, since he’s preparing for the end anyway, Kravitz looks up at the empty sky, and says, now to no one in particular, “Goodbye.”

And that’s that.

* * *

Taako wakes up with a headache. 

It is, of course, the concussion that did it. Cycle thirty two blows so far, and they’ve only been here for three weeks. It wasn’t even particularly dangerous here, Taako just has shit luck and doesn’t expect heavy objects to be falling out of second story windows that he was passing underneath.

It’s fine. He’ll live. He’s not happy about it, but he’ll live, so he rolls out of bed, makes himself a coffee out in the kitchen and grumpily asks Barry (the only other person awake) where that stupid prescription they got from the apothecary is because he wants to go see if they can help him deal with his head so he might as well pick it up while he’s there. Barry looks at him with a mixture of sympathy and mirth, which is how everyone’s been reacting to his foul mood, and tells him it’s on the fridge. 

Taako very carefully takes the paper off the fridge while trying to make it look like he wouldn’t care if it ripped and then puts it in his pocket. 

The walk to the apothecary is short, and not at all distracting enough to keep Taako’s head from bothering him or for him to enjoy the nice day outside. The sky is a brilliant, shimmery gold on sunny days— which is most of them considering the four suns. It makes everything outside warm, and throws the light in ways that would be pretty if Taako could muster up the ability to care about it today. 

The small bell over the door of the equally small apothecary rings as Taako pushes the door open. Taako spends a couple seconds surveying the shelves lining the walls before a shuffle from the back of the shop grabs his attention. 

“Hi, how can I help you?” The voice of the shopkeeper comes from the counter at the back, where she’s hurridly hidden the book she was reading before Taako came in.

“Yeah,” says Taako, crossing the small shop to stand at the counter, “Uh, I need—” He fumbles in his pocket for the little sheet detailing the potions he’s supposed to pick up. “It’s uhh— buncha hormone replacement stuff. Also, do you have anything for headaches?” He slides the paper with the order on it towards the shopkeeper and she takes it, nodding. 

“Sure thing. And depends, what caused the headache?”

“Fuckin’ concussion.” 

The shopkeeper winces in sympathy as she turns around and grabs the four potions requested, and Taako starts digging through his pockets for the gold pieces he needs to pay for it all. It was, of course, a total waste of money to buy hormone replacement potions when Barry and Lup had figured out substitutes during the first cycle. They had to— four crew members needed it and all of them had only brought enough for two months (except Davenport, who brought extra just in case, and he supposes Magnus probably would have run out just before the end of the trip had it actually ended). But they insisted on getting their hands on whatever could be found in a cycle with life in it— something about improving their own version. 

“Here you are!” The shopkeeper’s voice pulls Taako from his thoughts, and she puts four potions down on the table. “The red one’s the estrogen. The purple ones are the testosterone. And I think you’re probably better off with a generic health potion for that concussion, want me to grab one?”

Taako waves his hand dismissively. “No, I know a cleric. I’ll figure it out.” Behind him, the bell above the door jingles, a sound that Taako ignores as he counts out gold pieces. 

“Hello again!” says the shopkeeper. Taako glances up at her, and notices her customer service smile has just gotten a little faker. 

“Hello,” says the person who just came in, tone just slight apologetic. “I just…” and then he trails off, which is good, because Taako has frozen in place, second to last gold piece hovering in his hand just above the counter. It’s too familiar, and it can’t be him, so Taako doesn’t turn around. 

“Kinda rude that you didn’t say _see you tomorrow_. Thought that was the thing we had going on—”

The shop is small. Taako drops the coin he’s holding and he has wrapped his arms around Kravitz before it’s even finished clattering on the wood of the counter. There’s a half second where Kravitz doesn’t respond at all, and then he’s hugging Taako back, and holy shit, Taako hadn’t realized just how much he’d missed Kravitz. 

( A small part of his brain wants to just stay here, hugging Kravitz, forever, and that’s just a little too sentimental and touchy-feely for Taako, so he takes it as his cue to back away. )

“Fucking took you long enough,” Taako grumbles, pulling back from Kravitz and absently fixing his jacket. Kravitz laughs. “Seven fucking years, you bastard.” Kravitz’s eyes widen slightly, and then he furrows his brows. 

“It’s normally only a couple, right?”

“Uh, yeah! Like three max! Yo— we thought you’d kicked the bucket for good this time by the fifth cycle!” He makes sure his tone stays light, but he can tell Kravitz hears the hard edge underneath. Which isn’t really fair, since it’s not Kravitz’s fault that he died, but so it goes. Kravitz can handle it. 

“I’ll try to be dead less next time then,” says Kravitz, and then laughs when he sees Taako suppressing a smile. 

“You better,” says Taako, and then turns on his heels to finish his transaction. The shopkeeper is barely masking her curiosity, but Taako doesn’t give her any answers, just scoops his shit up and puts it in the paper bag she hands him. 

“Thank you,” she says, clearly on autopilot, “Have a nice day.”

“Will now,” says Taako, and then heads out, grabbing Kravitz’s sleeve as he passes and dragging Kravitz out of the shop with him. Kravitz falls into step beside him and Taako drops his sleeve so he can carry the potions a little bit more carefully. 

“How’d you even find me? How come— why can you even remember me?”

“Saw you at the apothecary last week.” Kravitz fiddles with a button on his sleeve before continuing. “It’s, uh, maybe not the most practical solution, but I just kept visiting every day and hoped I would catch you. I didn’t really have any other leads, so that seemed like my best bet.”

“Okay, well, in uh, in most other contexts, that would deffo make you sound like a stalker, so—”

“Alright, well, I can just stay home next time—”

Taako laughs, and Kravitz’s smile gets a little wider. 

When they get to the Starblaster and Taako throws open the door with renewed gusto, concussion headache suddenly brought back into sharp relief by the loud BANG of the door hitting the wall.

“Hey Taako, what the fuck?” says Barry, poking his head around the corner. He takes a solid three seconds to process before his eyes widen. Taako doesn’t let him get a word in edgewise. 

“Here’s your potions. They’re, uh, different colours, so you—”

“Kravitz! You’re back!” says Barry, taking the bag from Taako. 

“I am,” says Kravitz, at the same time Taako says, “Okay, well, n— do I get a thank you, or—” 

Barry completely ignores him, leaning back down the hallway he came out of and yelling, “Hey everyone! Kravitz is back!”

“It’s fine, I’m— I’ll appreciate myself,” mutters Taako. Barry not so subtly rolls his eyes, but the entranceway suddenly becomes far too crowded and loud for Taako to respond as everyone piles in and excitedly says hello. 

It’s several solidly overwhelming minutes before Kravitz can get a word in edgewise, and even when everyone’s calmed down, he’s still being bombarded with questions.

“Do you remember it?”

“Remember what?”

“The Hunger, obviously,” says Magnus, prompting an ‘oh, right’ from Kravitz before he stops to think about it. 

Kravitz squints. “No. Well— no, but it’s different. Normally everything just gets fuzzier and fuzzier when I try to remember what happened at the ends of my lives but I just hit a dead end here.”

“A dead end?”

“I know that’s not helpful but,” Kravitz shrugs, “It just stops. The memory. Totally blank instead of a slow fade.”

“Okay, but—” Barry only just starts his sentence when Lup cuts him off. 

“Fuck's sakes, who cares about the details right now— Kravitz _got out_ of the Hunger.” When this doesn’t elicit the response Lup wants (or any response at all), she continues, “If Kravitz can get out of the Hunger, everything else might be able to, too.” Lup’s grin isn’t incredibly confident— they all know it’s a long shot, that Kravitz seems to be the exception and not the rule. 

But then again, everything they do is a long shot. So maybe they can afford to hope a little that they haven’t left total destruction in their wake— can afford to take this as evidence for something they've been blindly hoping for all along.

“Maybe,” agrees Davenport. Taako spots the growing hints of hope on his crew member’s faces, can feel his own grin growing to match Lup’s. 

Maybe might be enough for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i havent been to sleep yet so its still friday for me so i feel like im still counting this as up on time. 
> 
> also ik ive oversimplified hrt like a LOT and glossed over some the differences between taking testosterone and taking estrogen but its Fantasy so i figured it was forgivable. also they're not sex change potions they behave like hormone replacement therapy in this house we love and respect our trans characters and their transition and we don't magically make them cis THANK U (if it was unclear barry lup magnus and davenport are all #confirmed trans, not cos its relevant in any way but because im trans and i want to)
> 
> also also i have to redo my outline and check but im think we may be in for more than ten chapters. not like a billion more but possibly up to fifteen total chapters instead of ten. 
> 
> anyway closing notes thank u all so much again for ur super nice comments (& kudos and bookmarks & whatnot) and also your general patience with me and my updates i'm <333333 about it every time.


	5. Common Denominator

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey! this chapter contains violence and while i don't think it's quite enough to warrant an addition of the 'graphic depiction of violence' tag, i did wanna just give yall a warning so it doesn't catch you off guard.

Cycle thirty six offers a brief respite from the onslaught of difficult years. Not quite as good as the beach year, but hopefully close— no civilization to speak of, no hyper-dangerous plant or animal life, and they manage to track down the Light in the first month or so. That in and of itself is practically miracle work; it’s hard to find the Light when almost everything on this plane is bioluminescent. Daylight is only around an hour, and not very bright, but the light from the plants and animals lights up everything 24/7. 

The Light had blended into the environment almost too well; they’d been lucky that it had landed in a canyon of rocks, and even luckier the moss encroaching on that canyon had yet to mask the Light’s glow entirely. 

But now, here they are. A (relatively) quiet and safe planet to rest and recover before their time was up and they moved on to gods knew what else.

More specifically, here _Barry and Taako_ are, standing in a field full of some kind of purple flowering plant that reaches up to their knees, doing what could loosely be described as ‘field research’ (but more accurately as ‘escaping the Starblaster until whenever prank Magnus was clearly grinning about this morning blows over and/or catches someone else’). 

Some kind of bug nest or colony must be around here too, because the air is filled with them. They’re glowing a deep gold-yellow, but as far as either Barry or Taako can tell, they’re totally harmless, so they live and let live. 

The bugs— almost cartoonish in how round they are and their proportion of eyes to body— are easily the size of Taako’s hand. More importantly to Taako, the source of their luminescence is magical in nature. So is, as a matter of fact, everything else; Taako watches one sneeze (which is equal parts cute and horrifying breach of the things he knows about bugs) on a flower only to have it change colour. 

Barry writes something down in his notebook, humming softly. Taako leans over to inspect the now-blue flower, although he doesn’t have anywhere to put his findings (“Flower: Now Blue”) since he’d decried bringing a notebook outside as “nerd shit” to Barry’s face and then made him promise not to tell Lucretia. 

They work in comfortable silence, for awhile. It’s nice, that Barry seems to have picked up the ability to tell when silence doesn’t need to be filled (to be fair, after this many years of working together, if the crew had tried to fill every silence they would have long since lost it on each other). Or maybe he had it at the beginning. Taako wouldn’t be able to tell you— it was years before he learned to pay proper attention to anyone except Lup. 

It’s sort of jarring, the reminder of how close he actually is to the crew. Highlighted by quiet moments and implicit communication, the ability to read one another startlingly well. 

“Look, I’ve uh dis— I figured out the source of the uh, the magical luminescence. Check it,” says Taako, and snaps his fingers. His hair starts to glow the same soft yellow as the bugs around them. Barry gently pushes one out of the way when it gets too close and stifles a laugh. 

“Sort of an unproductive use of that ability, but sure.”

“Oh, just ‘cause you don’t— you don’t do anything fun with your research—”

Barry actually laughs this time, brushing off one of the bugs that tries to sit on his shoulder. It makes an almost annoyed buzzing sound and flies over to Taako instead, landing on his hat and resting there like something of a decoration. 

“It’s so weird how deserted this place is,” says Barry. “I feel like every second world is heavily populated. At least enough for there to be like, tourist attractions and people to talk to.”

“Sure,” says Taako, trying to inspect a flower without disturbing his hat too much, “Statistically speaking, we’ve been sort of, uh, sorta popu— populated world heavy here. I guess a break is nice.” Which isn’t strictly a lie. Populated worlds are still his favourites, but they are endlessly more complicated than deserted or near-deserted ones, and they’ve been to just… so many. One every two to three cycles. More than Taako thinks is reasonable, but considering he doesn’t actually know the makeup of the multiverse, it’s entirely possible that there are just _more_ populated planes to go to overall. 

Still. They’re at one often enough that the whole crew suspects that something about what planes they go to isn’t one hundred percent random.

Besides, the elephant in the room seems to just keep getting bigger no matter how hard Taako ignores it, and at this point ‘highly populated’ almost certainly means ‘Kravitz plane’, and as much as he likes— as much as he— well, Kravitz is his— as much as he likes spending time with Kravitz, the emptier planes allow him a quick breather, to buckle in and keep ignoring tension that is definitely not growing.

It’s never exactly the right time to go _Hey, remember when you kissed my forehead during a heartfelt and possibly last goodbye after refusing to come with me? What was up with that?_

More importantly, if he asks, Kravitz might answer. And if Taako is honest with himself, which is not a habit he feels like cultivating but is sometimes a necessary evil, he knows he’s not going to deal with that. 

“Yep,” agrees Barry, and something about his tone makes Taako turn and squint at him. “Although, you, uh, don’t you—” Barry clears his throat, and Taako’s suspicious squint drops into a look of resignation. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess where this is going, even though technically speaking, Taako could probably call himself one. “—miss the uh, populated worlds, a bit? Like, if you—”

“Okay— can you pl— can you just ask me whatever it is you’re uh, you’re tripping over. Like I don’t have time for—” Taako gestures vaguely, but Barry seems to get the idea. 

“Well,” he starts, “Me, and the crew—”

“Good,” interjects Taako, “Making sure I know you aren’t the uh, the sole perpetrator here, okay.”

“—were wondering,” continues Barry, as though Taako hadn’t said anything, “about Kravitz.”

Taako is silent for several seconds, staring at a bug buzzing some odd five feet back from Barry, before answering with an unconcerned, “What about him?”

“I feel like it’s unfair that I’m still the one who’s embarrassed in this conversation. It’s like, when you put me on the spot, I’m embarrassed, but when I put you on the spot, I’m also embarrassed—” 

“Oh for fuck’s sake— It’s fine. We’re friends, just like everybody else.”

“Hmm,” says Barry, who has recovered startlingly fast from being embarrassed. Fast enough that Taako is pretty sure it was a ploy, but not sure enough to bring it up. “Okay.”

“Fuck you.” 

“I didn’t say anything!” 

“But you thought it.” 

“Maybe.” 

Taako throws up his hands, throwing off the bug on his hat in the process (it does a quick circle around his head before flying off). “What do you want? Want a fuckin’ play-by-play of everything we do? A fantasy TMZ exclusive? Tough shit, because I don’t even know _about Kravitz_ , because it’s sort of hard to know _about Kravitz_ when we— when he keeps sending mixed signals, when I don’t know if or when I’ll ever fuckin’ see him again, and when he’s got whole entire lives to live while we get one fuckin’ groundhog year.” He stops up short and takes a deep breath. Barry’s eyes widen slightly at the tirade, but he bounces back pretty quickly.

“You want to complain about it?” And not that Taako needs permission to complain about shit, but it’s become an unspoken rule that the less they bring up how stifling and hopeless the repeats feel, the better for all of them. Taako gets that, but sometimes, a man’s gotta vent before he explodes. And he’s willing to bet everyone else is on the verge of complaining all the time too.

Not that everyone’s complaining about _this specifically_ , though.

“Of course I wanna complain about it! I mean, a couple cycles ago he kissed my forehead and what the fuck was _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Do— do you want an honest answer?”

“No. I don’t need your advice, Barry.”

“Okay,” says Barry pleasantly, and goes right back to studying his plants. There’s another few seconds of silence, and then Taako sighs. 

“I chan— I decided I do need advice, even if it’s yours.”

“I will pretend that wasn’t insulting.”

Taako ignores the quip, for everyone’s sake. “I just don’t— like am I supposed to know where to fucking go from here?”

“Maybe,” says Barry, “You should take your own advice. You have time.”

It’s different, somehow. The kind of time he has versus the kind of time Kravitz has does not really put them on equal footing. 

“Yeah,” says Barry, and Taako is reminded again that thirty six years is a pretty decent chunk of time to know someone, even for an elf. “I know that could be uh, more helpful. But I think the best you can do is just… make the most of the time you have.”

“Easier said than done, my man.” It comes out snarkier than he means it to, but Barry takes it in stride. Besides, it’s justified. Probably.

“Yeah. Good news though, you have a possibly infinite amount of years to figure out another solution, or to try and figure out why Kravitz even reappears the way he does.” 

Taako blows a raspberry. 

“And,” continues Barry, “Maybe it wouldn’t kill you to start hoping for the best. After all, we thought we were shit out of luck with figuring out the Hunger, and now Merle is holding fucking meetings every year.”

“And dying like, every ye— every single time.”

“He comes back.”

“You sound like Lup.”

“You have to know that’s not a bad thing.” Barry flips his notebook shut and sits down in the field, nearly disappearing because of its height. 

“Yeah, fine,” relents Taako. “It’s fine.” 

Barry rolls his eyes. “Come here and help me investigate the roots of this thing.” 

Taako grumbles, but sits down in the flowers next to Barry to figure out how deep into the plane this arcana thing goes. 

It’s an hour or two by the time they head back to the Starblaster, Barry’s notebook much fuller than it was when they started, and Taako has not only used his new knowledge the make his hair glow, but also his shoes and his IPRE jacket. It makes him look more ridiculous than anything, but Taako can live with ‘ridiculous’. 

Besides, it all but fades by the time they get back.

The second they get into the common room where the crew is gathered, Barry says, “Hey Lucretia, Taako called bringing a notebook outside with him ‘nerd shit’, so—”

Taako whirls around, betrayal written all over his face. “Oh, you son of a bitch.”

Lucretia puts a hand over her heart, mouth dropping open into a definitely fake look of shock and hurt. 

“It’s— it’s your job to have a notebook outside,” he says, “But if Barry does it, then it’s nerd shit.”

“Oh sure,” says Lucretia, holding her notebook a little tighter, “Lie to my face, that’s fine.”

“Yo— Okay. I’m going to bed.” 

“It’s like five pm!” protests Barry, and Lucretia breaks into snickers. Taako waves him off; he’s committed now, so he sulks off to his room, ignoring his friends behind him. 

He only makes it about six hours before he has to leave to get a snack, although luckily by that time the activity in the common areas of the ship have mostly ground to a halt. 

Lup and Barry are still up; he can hear them talking a he approaches the kitchen door, something about the Light (which isn’t uncommon; it’s almost always something about the Light). 

“...so we can probably use that next cycle,” Barry is saying, “You’re staying up to try to get a handle on the vessel thing, right?”

“Sure thing, babe.” There’s a few seconds of silence, and then Lup says, “Well anyway, I’ve got to—”

“Right, right,” says Barry, “I’m gonna—”

Taako rolls his eyes as they stumble over each other, and he takes a step back so that when Barry comes to the door, it doesn’t seem like Taako was eavesdropping. Sure enough, Barry comes rushing out of the door, cheeks tinged red. He widens his eyes at Taako— who raises his eyebrows in response— and then brushes past him without saying anything. 

Idiots. But this is sort of a pot and kettle situation, so he doesn’t say anything about it when he enters the room. Lup snaps her head up when he enters, relaxing a moment later. The Light, sitting on the table, seems to glow slightly brighter in the presence of another person, but Taako can’t guarantee he’s not imagining it. 

“Oh, it’s just you,” says Lup. Before Taako can respond, she goes back to studying the scattered papers covering the table. Taako spots a bowl of chips, and Lup must sense him noticing it because she says, “Don’t touch my fucking chips, I’ve been saving them for two cycles.”

“And they— aren’t they stale now?” Taako grabs a seat next to her, glancing briefly at her notes. “What’re you working on?”

“No,” says Lup, although Taako isn’t quite convinced, “And I’m looking through what we know about the Light to see if it might be, uh, sentient. Or alive— since it’s able to communicate needs.”

“We’re calling the thing it does _‘communicating needs’_?” 

“It needs to be sought after it and it makes you want it,” says Lup, grabbing a handful of chips, “I don’t see how that’s not ‘communicating needs’.”

Even just sitting here across from it, it’s got a pull. A dull ache of want in the bottom of Taako’s stomach that is all too comfortable. 

“Sentient, huh? What does that mean, in practice? Like can we talk to it?”

Lup shrugs. “I dunno. And it doesn’t seem to really make… actions. It’s just that like, a rock doesn’t have needs, you know? Given the right vessel, we _might_ be able to talk to it.”

“Vessel,” echoes Taako. 

“Yeah. I think the barrier is that we can’t speak to it, not that it’s unintelligent or incapable of thought or anything.” Lup sighs. “It’s interesting, but I guess it doesn’t change much. And Capn’port and I started going over what we know about the Bond Engine again— to figure out like, Kravitz’s thing— while you and Barry were out, and we didn’t have much luck with that either.” 

“Lotta dead ends.”

“Yep.” Lup rubs her temples. “I keep going back to what Lucretia said about non-linear time travel but it doesn’t— not that it doesn’t match up but that it’s too free-floating. I feel like all the information we know about, well, fuck, anything, is all seperate from one another when it should be connected.” 

“So we’re, uh, we’re missing something.”

“ _Wow_ , hadn’t thought of that,” quips Lup, and then, after a moment, “Sorry. Uhm. Yeah, we’re probably missing something. I’m hoping Merle can eventually help shed more light but it’s a waiting game for now.”

Taako snorts. “Shed some _Light_.”

“Shut up,” Lup groans. 

Taako reaches over and grabs some chips from the bowl, dodging Lup’s hand as she goes to smack his away and stuffing them into his mouth. “Fuck you,” he says, voice muffled by the chips. 

Lup flips him off. 

“God Lup, these are— why did you keep these so long, they’re fuckin’ gross.” 

“Cause I knew you’d eat them, so, uh— so gotcha,” says Lup, and Taako humors her by flipping her off too, although he’s pretty sure this was more of Lup just forgetting she kept these very good chips for too long, and not an elaborate prank. 

So maybe they aren’t really getting anywhere vis a vis the Light or the Hunger or the bonds or Kravitz. Sometimes it’s the little things, like stealing your sister’s chips. If they aren’t getting anywhere, maybe getting by can tide them over until they do. 

It sort of has to. 

Lup turns back to her notes. Taako stands and lingers by the table, thinking briefly about how he might miss this plane when they leave. For the peace and quiet, for the interesting landscape, for the new arcana. And then he pushes it aside; if he thought like that he’d miss every plane they ever encountered. He already misses too many. 

The Light seems to tug a little harder at him, but he doesn’t know what it wants. 

Taako retreats to his room, wondering how long until that tide sweeps them out to sea.

* * *

It’s their thirty eighth cycle, and it’s been three days since they’d heard anything from Lucretia and Barry. 

Which blew, partly because not hearing from them just sucked in and of itself, and partly because up until then, things had been going pretty well. Lucretia and Barry had found a town of sorts, although Lucretia reported everything seemed makeshift and temporary, the people on edge. Like at any second they’d pack it in and have to run. 

They had a lead on the Light. And the night before they’d lost contact, Lucretia had called and said they’d spotted Kravitz among the people and waved at him, so they should’ve been able to talk to him the next morning. 

And then radio silence. Davenport’s stone of farspeech wouldn’t connect— they weren’t even sure whether Lucretia and Barry’s stones of farspeech were intact, let alone whether they still had them. 

They were only two days travel away from the Starblaster. So silence for three days wasn’t exactly reassuring.

“If you don’t find them in a week, come back,” says Davenport, as Lup and Taako get ready to go. “And remember if you get hurt, there’s no rescue party rescue party.” His face is grim, and spells it out perfectly— no one is coming after them because they don’t have enough people left. Especially with Merle doing Parlay so early in the year. 

“Gotcha,” says Lup. “We’ll keep in touch.” 

“Please,” says Davenport. Taako buckles the last strap on his backpack and gives an exaggerated salute. Davenport’s smile is strained, but it’s here, so it counts in his book. That’s it for goodbyes; Magnus is still running a mild fever so he’s resting and said goodbye to them a few hours ago.

Unceremonious. Just like everything else they do. 

Taako and Lup head outside to start the trek in the direction of Lucretia and Barry’s last known location. 

An hour or so gets them to a sight they’re previously only seen from above— one of several massive stone ruins, long overgrown but clearly once part of gargantuan castles and forts. 

The ruins, which had already seemed huge from the Starblaster, become monstrous up close. Two pillars that at one point would have marked an entrance loom skyscraper high as the twins walk between them to cross the ruins. Whatever used to live here would see them as ants.

Or maybe it was just a very rich person with a flair for the dramatic. Taako could get behind that. Either way, it takes them a while to pick their way across the fortress, footsteps echoing every time they take a step. A tree has grown through the middle of the floor, turning what should have been a flat walk into several small climbs. Taako jumps down from a flat stone segment, lifted by a tree root, before spotting something shiny on the ground. 

“Lup— check this out.” Taako leans down to wipe away the grime as Lup lands beside him. Underneath his fingers, the dirt vanishes to reveal what caught the light in the first place— the ground is inlaid with gold. 

“Nice. Would have had marble floors with gold myself, but still.” 

Taako snickers, but the echo of his laugh sobers him up quickly. “What _is_ this thing?”

“Dunno. Lucretia and Barry didn’t mention much about the ruins. I think if they found anything Lucretia would have written it down.” 

“Of course.”

“I don’t like that there’s this— this like big fortress of something huge, but the only town they found fill of uhm, people, our size? That it’s more like a camp than anything.”

Taako agrees with her, but doesn’t have the energy to dwell. “Let’s find them, and since they’ve found Kravitz maybe we can get some answers around here.” He knows he doesn’t sound sure, but Lup doesn’t comment.

They keep going, calling Davenport before they stop for the night. 

What else is there to do?

It’s a day and a half before they reach the place Lucretia and Barry said they were last, and they know because they’ve hit the town described, although it probably didn’t look like this when Lucretia and Barry got here. 

“What happened to this place?” 

It’s a rhetorical question; Lup can see exactly what Taako can see. The burnt up tents, trashed paths and wagons, scorched dirt, massive arrows with matching massive footprints— well, claw marks. The impacts left behind were from something more creature than human.

Not a soul in sight. 

Whatever hulking thing that lived here was not as ancient as the ruins they’d passed suggested. Taako touches the end of an arrow as they pass it; sticking out of the ground, it easily reaches his waist.

“Yowch,” he says to himself, and Lup hums an agreement. He takes a second look around, and then steps forward to move some of the canvas of one of the collapsed tents over. Scorched ground and a broken pot, but nothing else. “No bodies.”

“Do you think that’s good or bad?”

“Haven’t decided yet.” 

“Mhm.” Lup raises her stone of farspeech. “Captain?”

“Yeah, what’s u— I mean, status report?”

“Dav, you can just say what’s up, it’s been like almost forty years.” Davenport coughs slightly at this, and Lup continues, “We found the town, or uh, camp? Thing that Lucretia and Barry found. Only it’s been fuckin’ decimated and there’s no one here anymore.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“A fire maybe? Or an attack of some kind? Lots of arrows. But no people.”

“Dead or alive,” interjects Taako, “There’s no people but there’s also no bodies.”

“Also, uh, remember those ruins?”

“Yep,” says Davenport.

“Okay, well, whatever used to live there— I doubt it’s long gone. The weapons here are much bigger than people, and there’s… well, tracks of something. Something big.”

There’s a few moments of silence and the Davenport says, “Any idea where Lucretia and Barry might have went, if…” He doesn’t finish, but they get the idea. 

“No,” says Lup, “We’ll keep looking, and we’ll call you tonight or if anything changes.”

“If you don’t find a lead, just come back.”

“Sure thing, Cap.”

“Lup,” says Davenport, “That better not be your ‘I’m about to ignore direct instructions’ voice.”

“I heard you, if we don’t find a lead we head right back.”

“Lup!”

“We’ll call you later okay bye!” Lup hangs up and slips the stone into her pocket. “Okay, so we try to find where we think people went and we just follow it.”

“So we _are_ ignoring direct instructions?” It’s not really a question, but Taako asks to see the grin on her face. 

“Of course, who do you think I am?” 

“Just checking.” Taako snickers. The two of them split off, trying to find signs of life, always staying within sight of each other. It’s awhile before Taako finds something, and it isn’t much— a handful of scattered footprints that lead off vaguely into the woods, but he calls Lup over anyway.

“Better than anything else,” she says, and they take off into the woods, following the less than evident path. 

It takes the better part of an hour to get hopelessly lost.

“I swear to— I promise we have seen that fuckin’ tree before.”

“What? No we haven’t.”

“Yes, we have, see how tha— the branch that like, uh, cu— loops under the other one?”

“Lots of trees have that.”

“Uh, no they don’t.”

“Uh, yes they do.”

“I’m calling Davenport.”

“You’re telling on me?”

“Please, Lup, we’re adults.” Taako reaches into his pocket and grabs his own stone of farspeech. “But yes, I’m telling on you.”

“Oh come on, we’re not lost, we just—”

“Hello? Is someone there?”

Taako and Lup stop bickering, Taako’s hand frozen around his stone of farspeech. The stranger’s voice is a little muffled, but not that far away. Lup and Taako exchange a look, and then Lup clears her throat.

“Uhm, hello?” She says, in the general direction of their left. 

“Hello!” repeats the voice, more excited now, “Oh good, someone else— hold on, where are you? Nevermind, you can just— uhm, can you follow the sound of my voice?”

Another look, and then Taako shrugs, and Lup says, “Yeah, hold on, we’re coming!”

“Okay, uh, one, two, three, four, five…”

The person keeps counting, and Lup and Taako find them before they reach thirty, stumbling onto a much more defined path and a few other people— a half dozen, or thereabouts.

“We were right next to a path the whole fuckin’— of course. Typical,” whines Taako.

The person who was talking to them— a young dwarf woman with intricately braided but slightly neglected red hair— extends a hand for a handshake. Lup accepts it. 

“I’m glad we found you— I’m Selene.”

“Lup, and this is my brother Taako.” Taako waves, and then surveys the rest of the crew. All of them look fairly disheveled in some way or another, and there’s five of them in total, including Selene. A drow woman with bright blue hair, a gnome girl, an incredibly tall dragonborn man, and standing at the back of the pack is—

“—Kravitz.” He looks exactly as Taako remembers, albeit tired as the rest of his party. “Oh thank _fuck_ it’s you— Finally we catch a fuckin’ break.” 

Kravitz narrows his eyes and furrows his brow, and it’s a look so familiar that Taako’s stomach drops before his brain even processes why.

“Sorry, who are you?” 

“Listen man,” says Lup, “We’ve, uh, we’ve had a rough week, so if you could please stop fucking with us—”

Taako puts a hand on her arm. “He doesn’t know who we are.”

Lup does a half turn to face him and stage whispers in a way that definitely does not cover what she’s saying, “Why would he not know who we are.”

“I don’t fuckin’ know, but does it look like he remembers us?”

“Are you two okay? How did you know my name?” Kravitz steps to the front, confusion written all over his face. 

Taako can’t deal with this right now. 

“We’re uh, we’re totally good. Lemme ask you th— we’re looking, uh, for our friends, and we think you met them. Uhm, Both humans, one i— she’s probably carrying a notebook—”

“White hair, early tw—” Lup starts to interject, but Taako keeps talking over her.

“Other one like, a blockbuster employee looki—”

“Kind of handsome but like, in a subtle way—”

“Hold on— wait.” Taako stops badly describing his friends to Kravitz, growing worry momentarily subdued by the look on Lup’s face. “You think Barry—”

“No! Well, kind o— Yes. Stop talking to me.”

Taako stifles a laugh, before Kravitz clears his throat to get their attention again. 

“Uhm, no, I haven’t seen your friends. How did y—” 

“No hold on— I’ve seen them.” The drow woman steps forwards, elbowing Kravitz in the ribs. “So has he.”

“What? Really?”

“Yeah, Kravitz, because they waved at you, and you leaned over to me and asked if I knew who they were.”

“Oh. Okay.” Kravitz says it so nonchalantly for a fact that throws Taako for a fucking loop. If Kravitz’s memory wasn’t triggered by seeing the crew, then what is it triggered by? This was what they thought they knew— if they were wrong about this, then what else were they already wrong about? How do you end up with incorrect conclusions when you haven’t been able to draw any in the first place?

“Do you know where they are now?” asks Lup.

The woman shakes her head. “We didn’t go talk to them and then that night the camp was torn apart.” Lup and Taako must not look too happy about that news, because the woman continues, “They could still be alive! Lots of people were running. We’re going to a rendezvous point now, if they tagged along with other people, that’s probably where they’ll be.” 

Kravitz clears his throat. “Sorry to backtrack but— who are you? Have we met before?”

It’s a reasonable question. A regular question. It’s one he’s heard Kravitz ask a billion times before, but in this context, it makes Taako have to fight to stop his hand curling into fists.

“We have,” says Taako, “On a different plane of existence. You’ve got a memory thing, and you’re supposed to remember after you see one of us and then go to sleep, but you don’t this time, so wh— dunno what’s up with that but it’s uh, it’s sort of harshing my fuckin’ vibe.” There’s no reason to lie. “Also, we’re aliens.” Lup steps on his foot. Maybe that was too much,

The drow woman laughs, and Kravitz puts a hand up. “Wysteria, I think he’s serious.”

“What, you believe that?”

“Well, no, but—”

“That’s fine,” says Taako, “You don’t have to believe us. I don’t care. You asked, we answered.” 

Kravitz furrows his brow at them. 

“Okay,” says Selene, “That’s uhm, that’s a little weird, but I don’t wanna leave you two alone for being a little weird, so you’re still welcome to tag along with us.”

“That would be great,” says Lup. 

“Okay!” says Selene, brightening up, “Uhm, you already seem to know Kravitz, and that’s obviously Wysteria, and that’s Elsie and Sawyer.” She points at the gnome girl (now that they’ve shifted focus, they notice how young she is— twelve, at the most. A child). and the dragonborn, both of whom give tentative waves. “We think Elsie’s parents are at the rendezvous point, so we should get going.” 

“Yeah,” agrees Lup, “Lead the way.” 

Once they start walking, Lup starts chatting with Selene, and Taako falls in step behind them, tuning out their conversation after a minute or so.

“Hey,” says Kravitz from his left, giving him a start. “Were you serious about all that?”

“Yeah,” says Taako. After he’s greeted with silence, he says, “Did you expect me to take it back?”

“I feel like that’s not unreasonable given how bizarre the claim ‘also, we’re aliens’ is,” says Kravitz dryly. Taako bites back a laugh in order to wallow in his own irritation some more. 

“Maybe but I’m— I can’t be bothered to lie about it, so bizarreness is just g— you’ll just have to deal.”

“What did you mean _‘on a different plane of existence’_?”

Taako sighs. He hates giving this speech to anyone at the best of times— it’s annoying and long and people have too many questions that he doesn’t want to answer or doesn’t know the answers to and half the time they don’t believe him anyway— but doing it now just feels like he’s the butt of a cosmic joke.

He does, though. If it was anyone else, he'd defer the responsibility to someone else, but it's Kravitz. 

Taako doesn’t dissect what that means.

“Okay— uh, crash course, puh- _lease_ don’t ask me if I’m serious about this, but Lup and I— and the rest of our crew, we’re uh, interplaner travellers. But after the maiden voyage, which was intentional, our hom— our first plane got— well, we’re not sure, but we sure can’t go back to it.” He laughs, a little hysterical. “Uh, since then we sorta have a, uh, a time limit— we spend one year on each plane before we have to go.” Taako leaves out the planes being destroyed bit. It’s sort of a conversation killer, and they’ve all had a rough few days. “You with me?”

“Following so far,” confirms Kravitz. 

“Dope, okay. So you’ve been on like, just under half the planes we’ve visited.”

“That seems like something I might remember.”

“But you never do! You always have to sleep first, for some fuckin’ reason, so you _should_ remember right now. To you we’ve just met but I’ve known you like— twe— te— at least fi— a number of years.” 

“Wow,” says Kravitz.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I do not,” says Kravitz, “Although I’d characterize it more like I don’t not _not_ believe you.”

“How is that n— that’s the same shit!”

“No! There’s less commitment to the disbelief. It’s like— what you’re saying sounds like total garbage, but I have no idea why you might lie about it and if it’s not true I don’t know how you’d know my name.”

“Or that you’re a musician.”

“Or that I’m a mu—” Kravitz cuts himself off and casts a wary eye at Taako, who shrugs. 

“Like I said, I don’t care if you believe me. We’ll see who’s laughing tomorrow. I exp— I want a written apology," says Taako, and Kravitz yawns. “Oh, am I boring you?”

He laughs and rolls his eyes, and Taako momentarily forgets Kravitz doesn’t have a clue who he is and laughs with him. Kravitz’s laugh turns into a second yawn, and he rubs his eyes. 

“No, just, the— well, the everything must be catching up with me.” 

“Not a great few days, huh.”

“To put it mildly.” 

Taako deliberates on asking about the destruction of the camp for moment, but eventually says, “What happened back there? That whole set up was, uh, pretty trashed when Lup and I got there.”

Kravitz shrugs, more in a _same old same old_ sort of way than an _I don’t know_ sort of way, so Taako lets out a long affected sigh. 

“Listen. You gotta— you gotta explain shit to me like I’m five. Or like I’m an interplaner traveller who doesn’t know anything about what happens here regularly.”

Kravitz gives a half-hearted laugh before sighing as well. “Monster attack,” he says haltingly, “It’s pretty rare that it happens anymore but uh, it tends to happen without warning or reason so most people are ready to pack up and go at a moments notice, with certain points to reconvene. We're the stragglers, I think— most people headed straight there, but we were looking for Elsie's parents and other people who might still be in the area.” Kravitz shrugs again. “It’s, uhm, I mean I try not to detract from how objectively horrific it is but if we talked about that too much I don’t think we’d ever be able to pick up our shit and keep going.”

Taako can appreciate that, so he quells a question about the specifics of the monster. They can dig up that dirt later, when Kravitz does actually remember them. 

_If_ , says a voice in his brain that he promptly squashes. “Rare?”

“Yeah. Should be months or maybe years until another one.” 

“Cool. What instrument do you play?”

Kravitz blinks at the change of topic, but latches onto it as fast as possible. “Uh, lyre.”

“You any good?”

“I would like to think so. At the very least, I’ve invested enough time in it that it would be embarrassing if I wasn’t.” Kravitz laughs, but Taako’s laugh doesn’t make it past the déjà vu settling in his chest. “It’s just a hobby, but it passes the time.”

“Kravitz,” calls Wysteria from the front, “Can you come here a minute?” Kravitz obliges, and as he leaves, Lup pops up beside Taako, making him jump. 

“Chr— Can you give me some warning next time?”

“Learn to listen better,” says Lup, breezing right into a recap of her conversation with Selene. “Selene says the thing that attacks them is like, some big semi-humanoid thing. No one’s ever seen them, or at least, no one Selene knows, and they have no idea if it’s the thing that built the ruins, but they do know it’s capable of archery, so that explains the very big arrows we saw. Also, no one’s ever talked to one or tried to, nor has anyone killed one, and also Selene doesn’t know what happened to the bodies of people. There is some urban legends about it though.” Lup pauses to take a breath, but continues before Taako can interject. “Also, she says it doesn’t happen often, just every few months or ye—”

“—years, I know, I was just talking to Kravitz about it.”

Lup stares at him for a second, then says, “You miss him.”

“Uh, no I don’t.”

“It’s okay that you miss him, you know.”

“I ju— I was just fuckin’ talking to him! I don’t miss him.”

“Yeah, but he’s not like…” She waves her hand slightly. “He doesn’t remember us.”

“Thanks, didn’t catch that.”

“You know what I mean.” Lup stares at the back of Kravitz’s head. “I don’t understand why he didn’t remember when he saw Lucretia and Barry. He’s remembered every other time he’s seen one of us.”

“Mhm,” says Taako, content to let Lup talk herself through it. He doesn’t want to think about it. 

“It just doesn’t make any sense…” She trails off, looking away from Kravitz, squinting at Taako, and looking at Kravitz again. “Oh.”

“What ‘oh’?”

“It doesn’t make any sense, _unless_ …”

“Unless?” prompts Taako, more on impulse than anything else. 

“Unless it’s just you, Taako.”

The anger that’s been building in Taako’s chest comes screeching to a halt the way a bowling ball dropped from the roof of a building might; loud, confusing, and unavoidable. Like he’s Wile E. Coyote just after realizing there’s no ground beneath him but just before he falls.

“Unless _what’s_ just me?” He knows. Oh, he knows what she’s implying, but it’s an entirely different can of worms, so maybe if he plays dumb they can forget about it for now. 

“Think about it, Taako— you’re the only common factor between all the times we saw Kravitz. Regardless of whether we were alone or in a group, you were always there— h my god, Taako, we’ve been going about this the wrong way the whole time. It’s not the engine— or, I guess it’s probably partly the engine, but not in— it’s you!”

Lup’s face is practically glowing, and Taako knows this is a breakthrough, but his stomach is too busy tying itself into knots to really celebrate. 

“Keep it down. H— how do we know for sure? Maybe it’s _you_. Ever think of that?”

“Wasn’t there that first time, and several other times. You were. Taako, you’re the common denominator here. It’s you.”

Taako stares at the back of Kravitz’s head, watches his face in profile when he turns towards Wysteria to listen to a joke of hers. 

“We won’t know for sure until tomorrow, obviously,” Lup is saying, “and then I think we’ll have to go back to the Starblaster, ask Kravitz some questions, stuff like that, and I doubt we’ll be able to prove it just because we don’t know anything about how— Taako, are you listening to me?”

Kravitz laughs, face scrunching up in a way Taako has seen a billion times before, over coffee, on the Starblaster, on countless different worlds in wildly different contexts.

“Yeah,” he says absently. “Yeah, I’m uh, I’m listening.”

“Oh yeah? Then what did I say?”

“Look, Lup, I’m— can we just deal with this whole uh, finding Barry and Lucretia mess before we tackle all that? Or at le— at the very least can we wait until tomorrow?”

Lup sees something in Taako’s expression that gives her pause. “Yeah, Taako,” she says finally, “We can talk about it tomorrow.”

They keep walking for the rest of the afternoon, and Lup calls Davenport to let him know what’s going on. She leaves out that they’d found Kravitz, probably because that’s not a conversation she wants to have in earshot of Kravitz until he regains the memories to make it not a batshit insane thing to talk about. 

Around twilight, Wysteria says they should stop, and they set up a temporary camp for the night. In about a half an hour they have a small fire going, and enough food for a decent, if small meal for everyone. Taako notes that he and Lup have now burned through almost a quarter of their supplies; they’re supposed to be on their way back to the Starblaster now, with Lucretia and Barry in tow. A quarter’s not a lot, but it’s enough that they don’t have time to be wandering around aimlessly. Lup’s tight-lipped expression says that she knows too. 

“Soon,” she says, and Taako nods.

The camp is relatively quiet for the rest of the night. Not scared, exactly, but skittish. Unable to turn off the fight or flight response long enough to properly relax. There’s quiet conversation, but in a few hours that dies down too. 

“I can take first watch,” says Kravitz. “I know it’s— it’s unlikely but I’d rather someone be awake.”

Taako wishes he wouldn’t. But there’s no non-creepy way to ask Kravitz if he can actually take second shift, so that he remembers the twins faster, so Taako just nods. 

“Are you sure Krav?” asks Wysteria, “You’ve been really tired all day, more than usual.”

“Can you blame me?” jokes Kravitz, stifling yet another yawn. “But I’ve got it. Besides, it’ll be your shift before you know it.”

Wysteria relents and starts setting up her own sleeping bag with everyone else. 

Taako has long since grabbed his blanket and bundled up into it, and now he pulls it closer around him, trying to debate whether it’s worth it to meditate right now.

Lup nudges him. “Get some rest,” she says. She doesn’t say that she’ll stay up out loud, but he gets the gist. 

“Wake me up when the shift is over,” he mutters, and Lup raises her eyebrows.

“Are you sleeping?”

“Yeah.” Meditation is great short term, and it’s probably what he should do, but meditation means he’s semi conscious, and he’s ready to just pass the _fuck_ out right now. He deserves to be unconscious for a few hours after today.

“Okay, I will.” 

Taako rolls over to face away from the fire, using his own arm as a pillow. It doesn’t take long for him to fall asleep. It’s been awhile since he’s slept. A couple cycles at least. Long enough to forget the downsides to sleeping, at least.

Meditation is silent. You’re semi-conscious, but your mind is empty. 

Sleeping means you dream. 

_Taako is standing in a field. A field, inside a grand hall, inside what doesn’t look like the Starblaster but definitely is. Behind him, someone clears their throat, so Taako spins around to investigate._

_It’s Kravitz._

_He’s wearing an IPRE robe. The formal dress one, too, long and official looking, nothing like the jackets they regularly wear out and about. Bright red, insignia on the breast pocket._

_“In another life, huh?” asks Taako._

_Kravitz laughs. “You’re telling me.” He looks down at himself. “I like it. Suits me.” Taako is inclined to agree. Then again, he’s sure he’d be inclined to agree no matter what Kravitz was wearing. “Hey, watch this.”_

_The red robe starts to fray, but not like it’s aging, more like it’s being unsewn. It unravels as one single string, slowly moving up the robe until there’s barely any robe left. As Taako watches, the loose end of the string moves of its own accord, floating over to Taako and wrapping itself around his arm like a bracelet._

_The other end of the string is still attached to Kravitz’s wrist as the cuff of the robe, but it finishes unraveling itself and ties off there too. Kravitz looks like he did that first cycle with the library._

_Taako’s eyes trace the string between him and Kravitz._

_“Huh,” he says. “I dunno wh— I really don’t know what this means.”_

_Kravitz shrugs. “I only know what you know.” He pauses, and then tilts his head. “Well, I do know one more thing.”_

_“Yeah?”_

_Kravitz takes another step closer to him, hand going to Taako’s waist. The thread connecting them wraps around their legs, like dog leashes in the meet-cute scene of a low-budget tropey rom-com. He leans in, closer, closer, until Taako can feel Kravitz’s breath on his face. Cool. Like wind._

_Then he stops. Tilts his head again, detouring to whisper in Taako’s ear. “I know if I’m there, you’ll find me.”_

_Faster than Taako can blink, Kravitz and the rope that connects them both fold in on themselves, disappearing with a quiet pop._

_Something makes a clanging noise behind him, metal on metal, echo-y and reverberating. A church bell, almost. Taako turns as the sound happens again._

_In the space behind him is the Light of Creation, bouncing, making that bell sound every time it hits the ground. It bounces, once more, twice more, and then shatters, breaking off into large chunks. One of them bounces at an angle and hits Taako in the chest, sending him reeling backwards. It embeds itself there, burrows itself into his ribcage. The other six scatter, going off down hallways and around bends._

_The Light in his chest is warm._

_He has to find the other six pieces._

_He’s running through the Starblaster, through halls too winding and rooms that yawn too large to be real, impossible distances with endless places to search. He rounds a corner and Lup grabs his arm._

_“What?”_

_“What are you doing?”_

_“Searching.”_

_“What for?”_

_Taako opens his mouth, but he’s not sure anymore. The part of the Light in his chest gets warmer, until it’s hot, until it’s burning. Lup starts shaking him. She’s wearing all black, less like a fashion statement and more like a funeral. She looks young, sixty, sixty five on the outside. A child._

_“Hey, cut it out!”_

_“Wake up,” says Lup. She shakes him again. Taako furrows his brow. The room around them grows, shaking at its foundation._

_“What?” says Taako._

“Taako, wake up!”

Taako wakes up and the world is on fire. He’s the second last up, although Selene is woken quickly too. Lup is talking to him, tugging on his arm as he gets to his feet. Kravitz is yelling something about regrouping at a rendezvous point, before telling Taako and Lup to follow him.

Taako’s ears are ringing. The tree next to them is set alight but when Taako whirls around, all he can see is a light grey fog. 

“What the fuck is happening?” he yells, stumbling in the fog after Kravitz, Lup still gripping his wrist.

“We’re under attack,” says Kravitz over his shoulder, taking a seemingly random left turn.

“Well I got that far by m— on my own!” snaps Taako. He shakes his head to try to clear it— last time he’s sleeping for awhile. Meditation doesn’t give you weird dreams and you don’t wake up feeling like your brain has been underwater for several hours. “I thought you said another attack wouldn’t happen for months!”

“It normally doesn’t!!” Kravitz turns briefly, whispering something and sending a bolt of lighting into a tree behind them, knocking it over and covering their path. The fog seems to be keeping pace with them, swirling around their feet in a way that’s too alive to be comfortable. The path in front of them is only visible for a few feet; they’re relying on Kravitz’s memory to guide them. “Do you want an apology because I’m not clairvoyant?” Ahead of them, a tree lights up in a column of flame, and Kravitz curses, taking a right. 

The fog in front of them swirls, agitated by something. Kravitz pays no mind and keep running, barely looking back to make sure Lup and Taako are still following, but Taako keeps on eye on it as he runs. The attention pays off, because out of the fog comes an arrowhead, tracking Kravitz.

Taako thinks his next move through about ¾ of the way through before he does it.

“Hey!” He yells, and casts Magic Missile. All three hit their mark, and the mass in the fog howls, whirling around and letting loose the arrow that used to be aimed at Kravitz. 

Perhaps Taako could have thought that plan through a little more. He tries to roll out of the way, but he knows even as he moves that it’s not far enough. Fucking typical, that he does a single selfless thing and it immediately fucks him over.

The arrow hits him in the stomach. For a second, it just feels like a pressure, sending him stumbling back a couple feet. He grabs the arrow, not to pull it out, but as though grabbing it will neutralize the hit. It’s big. More like a pole than an arrow, at least half an inch in diameter. 

_Gross_ , he thinks, and then his nerves catch up his brain and send pain searing through his side, jagged and sharp. It’s not so much that he screams and more that a scream is ripped from him without his consent, wrenched from his lungs on some impulse that kicks in before he can quell it. 

Lup whirls around and shouts something, but Taako’s isn’t paying attention. Looking up makes him feel dizzy but looking down at the arrow makes him feel ill. Kravitz stops dead at Lup’s shout, raising his hand, palm flat towards the sky, and shouting something. From a point above his head, a dome seems to unfold itself, translucent blue in colour. It takes only seconds to touch the ground, putting them inside a half bubble. The sounds of the world outside are muffled, and Taako watches as a branch hits the dome and bounces harmlessly off of it. 

Taako thinks he can hear his heartbeat pounding in his ears. Strained, fast, panicked, like his heart thinks it might be able to escape his chest and avoid the pain if it beats fast enough.

A secondary sensation has started spreading through his side, out from the wound; it feels like his blood is made of tar. Taako avoids getting shot with arrows as best he can, so he doesn’t know if this is normal. 

“Oh my god,” Lup is saying, “Oh my god. Taako, are you okay?”

“No offense Lup,” wheezes Taako, “But do I lo— do I seem like I’m o— I’m— like I’m having fun right now?” 

“Oh fuck,” says Lup. Her hands hover around him, like she wants to put a hand on his shoulder for comfort or check his wound, but isn’t sure if she’d make it worse. Taako feels like his stomach is lead-lined. Behind her, Kravitz does a quick check to make sure his spell will hold before turning his attention to the twins.

“Don’t you— you leave arrows in, right?” says Lup, “Until you can bandage the wound.”

“Yes,” says Kravitz, pulling off his jacket. “Help me tear this into strips. The healing spell I have isn’t very effective and it’ll work better if we bandage him up first. We don’t have much time— I won’t be able to maintain this shelter long enough to wait it out.” 

Lup guides Taako until he’s sitting, and the movement sends so much pain shooting through him he nearly blacks out; and then he’s looking up at the sky. Lup and Kravitz are talking, hurried voices that Taako can’t quite make out. 

Taako can’t feel his legs, and even he knows that’s not normal. 

“Something— wrong—” he manages, hands clutched around the arrow shaft. It was a tough blow, obviously, but it shouldn’t hurt this bad. It feels like his gut is being seared, like he’s being cooked alive and dumped in ice all at once. “Arrow— out—” The treetops above them are hard to make out, even though he could see them clearly a second ago, despite the blue tint. Taako’s not an idiot, although he’s definitely angry with himself for not figuring it out faster. “Poison.” 

“Oh shit,” says Lup, and then he can kind of make out her face above him. “Hey, stay with us— you’re gonna be totally fine.” 

“Hmm,” says Taako. “Doubtful.”

“You’re a dickhead.”

“We have to pull the arrow out right now,” says Kravitz, disembodied and distant. “Taako, move your hands.”

“No can do,” says Taako. They aren’t moving. The sensation seems to be crawling up his body. He tries not to think about what happens when it hits his brain. No sense speculating, right? “Paralyzed.” 

“Oh god,” says Lup, and then her hands are prying at his, grabbing the arrow. “I’m so sorry,” she says, and pulls the bolt out.

“Fuck!” Taako’s prepared several other curses, but it’s over before he can get any of them out. The initial pain is fading, but more because it feels like he’s being smothered than because it’s healing. The rise and fall of his chest takes a lot more effort now.

Dimly, he recognizes Kravitz is bandaging him. “Lup, I can’t stop the bleeding.”

Unsurprising, judging by how faint Taako feels. “Wound big,” he says, managing an eye roll. 

“No shit,” snaps Lup, but there’s no malice in it. It’s more endearing than anything. “Should we have left the arrow in?”

“No,” says Kravitz, “It’s not— the poison was going to kill him.”

“Still is.” The sensation is climbing slower, sure, but it’s climbing, and unless they have an antidote, it’s probably going to keep climbing. 

“So what? What do we do?”

Kravitz doesn’t say anything, although the pressure on his wound increases. The silence is answer enough, anyway. 

“There has to be something,” says Lup. Ever the optimist. The _something_ was making sure the Starblaster got off the fucking ground so he could come back. 

“Dunno what your problem is,” Taako mutters, “I’ll see you next year.” He sucks in a breath. His lungs hurt. “Kravitz I’ll see you… when I see you.”

“Taako,” says Kravitz gently, “You won’t see me again. You’re dying.” Taako would laugh if he had the energy. The humor fades fast, and instead he’s just bitter, now, bitter about not getting to see Kravitz as he knows him, bitter about how he always remembers Kravitz first, has to contend with looking him in the eyes and seeing no recognition there when they’ve known each other for years. Bitter that he's dying with so many unanswered questions, even if it's temporary, even if it doesn't really matter to him the specifics of this plane because he would've been gone in a year anyway.

“Not this time,” confirms Taako, “But next lifetime I will. You c— you can’t kill me off for good. And that is— that, uh, that’s a threat.” 

“Okay, Taako. I’ll see you next time.” The sorrow and compassion in his voice hit Taako like a ton of bricks. There’s no way that explanation convinced Kravitz, he was just trying to make these last moments agreeable. Taako wonders, if it’s him that triggers the memories, if Kravitz will remember at all once he dies, or if Taako will just be that random stranger who insisted they knew each other before bleeding out in front of him. 

Both of them are upsetting to think about. Taako doesn’t have the energy to parse through why. Instead, he pitches his voice low, puts on an accent, and says, “ _I’ll be back._ ” 

“Shitty Fantasy Terminator impression for how long you’ve been working on it,” says Lup. He can’t see very well, but he can tell from her voice she’s choking down tears. 

“Can’t all be winners,” he says, and then, “Oh fuck, I ruin— fucked up my own last words. Shit.” Distantly, he can hear Lup bark a laugh, and then she grabs his hand. 

Taako has only died once before. Lucky, maybe. Merle’s already hit double digit deaths, although that’s really to be expected with the whole parlay thing. It hurts, of course. But more importantly, despite all their joking about death and treating it like a walk in the park, when it happens, the wound is still fresh. Lup isn’t joking now. 

Taako can’t move his fingers to squeeze Lup’s hand back, and that hurts almost more than the physical wound.

He wants to say something else. A better one liner, maybe. Tell Lup not to worry, to get back to the ship. But his jaw won’t move anymore. He shuts his eyes while he still can. 

He doesn’t open them again. 

At least, not here.

* * *

Kravitz wakes up with a headache. Head splitting, though momentary— they’re getting worse every time. He pushes himself to a sitting position, hands flying to his temples, but the pain is gone before he can even react. 

“Kravitz?” Lup is standing a bit away, but turns towards him when she hears him stir. “Do you— do you remember?”

There a split second where he has to search for what she means, and then grief floods him, tidal, torrential. His hands dig into the dirt under them. 

_Taako._

“Yeah,” he chokes out, and then, “Shit.” 

His world skews violently on an axis and then rights itself somewhere new. Somewhere where Lup standing in front of a shallow grave they’d spent time digging last night was not as distant as it used to be. Somewhere where he knew the person buried underneath. 

Lup seems to collapse as soon as Kravitz confirms his memory, sinking until she’s sitting down on the dirt beside the grave. Unmarked. At the end of the year, there would be a single person on the planet who knew anything about him. 

The weight of that sits heavy in Kravitz’s chest. 

“Lup?”

“Mm?” Lup’s voice sounds like a pot about to boil over; Kravitz had been about to ask her what to do, but he already knows she has no idea either. What are you supposed to do after you bury your brother?

What are you supposed to do after you bury a man you should have known but didn’t? After you have to haul his sister, crying, to her feet, after you have to carry his body far enough away that you have time to bury him at all?

_It’s not fair_. The bitterness is overwhelming and comes without warning. It’s not fair that Taako is dead, it’s not fair that Kravitz didn’t even talk to him, not really, not knowingly. Not fair that he’ll remember this for the rest of his life, how he and Taako passed each other without ever making contact.

“We—” Lup takes a deep breath. “We should keep moving. See if we can find, uhm, find Lucretia and Barry.”

“Yeah,” says Kravitz, and struggles to his feet before offering Lup a hand up; she takes it. Her expression is set. Lup doesn’t have time to grieve, won’t have time to grieve before Taako is back. 

Kravitz has his entire life to grieve. 

He’s not sure which is worse. 

“And then, if— if you’re okay with it, could you come back to the Starblaster? I have a theory that I need your help to test.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bet You Thought You'd Seen The Last Of Me. at this point, 3mos between chapters and 10k words per chapter is just How It's Going so I'm not going to make any promises that I will break about when I'm updating, but I'm sorry in advance about it. anyway thanks for sticking around, and as always you can find me on tumblr @tieflinggay or on twitter @elftwink if thats more your jam!


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